

Japan donates ballot boxes worth $7.5 mil for Cambodia election



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$750 per box. Hmm, are they bomb proof or something? Surely Cambodia would have benefited more from $7.5 million spent on more important things.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

A more accurate cost breakdown per box would likely be:

$100 box cost / $50 "consultant fees" / $600 profit for winning bidder.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

And pre-stuffed with votes for the government!

3 ( +3 / -0 )

Supporting a dictatorship with ballot boxes is the ultimate ignorance!

2 ( +2 / -0 )

I've just had a quick calculate, thats $750 per box, AND they want some more, plus screens! blinking heck i am in the wrong job! I think that I will have to tender for supplying brown paper bags, as Japan seems to require a lot of them.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

What is happening in Cambodia is a real shame. While it was never a full-fledged democracy, it was a much freer country 10 or 15 years ago. Now aided by Chinese money, Hun Sen has become a full on dictator, and his regime is now arresting journalist, opposition politicians and simple citizens for making critical comments against him. A real shame.

Also a shame that Japan is supporting this, but strategically speaking, it's also completely understandable that it doesn't want to leave the country in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

This has nothing to do with the Japan gov't supporting Cambodian elections. It has to do with them supporting the company that makes those boxes.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

For national elections in Canada, we use cardboard boxes, and when the polls close, it's up to the people looking after the distribution of ballots to open those boxes and record all the votes, at the polling station, and then to have them reported to a central authority by the person in charge of the station. Very little cost - they do pay the polling station workers. Seems to me that those boxes provided by Japan are a tad over-the-top. You don't need steel boxes to hold marked ballots, if elections are truly transparent and honest. I've run those polling stations several times, and never seen corruption, so when I read about elections in other countries, I often shake my head and wonder how the everyday man and woman who votes puts up with the nonsensical security that shouldn't be necessary.

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Hun Sen is an ex Khmer Rouge leader and has imprisioned or forced opposition to flee. There is no need to have a vote. The money should be spent on textbooks in rural communities.

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Of course there would be no strings attached eh

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Might just as well burn them. Cambodia is a Chinese sponsored one party dictatorship these days, no different from China itself. Japan is wasting money that would be better spent supporting democracies elsewhere.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

OMG! Nippon donates 7.5 million USD for harmless and peaceful ballot boxes and gets blitzkrieged while USA and EU sends unsolicited deadly bombs and cruise missiles into Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and the Human Rights Groups suddenly becomes blind, mute and deaf!

Japan is not sending weapons of mass destruction to Cambodia but only tools needed to safeguard the electoral process.

Why is that bad?

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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