NOT Result In Presidential Elections

Introduction In today’s political world, there is a large part of the population who votes in elections marred with electoral fraud and malpractice. These people suffer the consequences of having non-representative governments where the government does not reflect the votes and will of the people. One would think a country devoid of fraud during the electoral process would remove previously cheating and poorly performing incumbents, resulting in better functioning governments, which is untrue. Removing electoral fraud from an election does not guarantee that the previously fraudulent or poor performing incumbents will be removed from office.

Why do Fair Elections NOT Result in Better Representatives? Even when election fraud becomes absent in an election, this by no means leads to the election of quality representatives. In many situations elections free of fraud can result in the reelection of previously fraudulent and poorly performing officials. When elections occur they are not always about government performance and quality of representatives. People in free

Candidates use this tactic to promise an area something such as a hospital to try to obtain the maximum amount of votes in this region. An issue with pork barrel politics is that it allows certain areas to be granted an immense amount of resources, while other locations less important to the election are ignored during the tenure of the government. An example of this is seen in the film An African Election about the 2008 Ghana Presidential election in which John Atta Mills promised an airport that would fly to Mecca for a specific city during his campaign. Pork barrel promises like this are detrimental to a strong government because they undermine the idea that a government should serve all people