In the past, India’s Goa has had a serious gender-gap problem when it comes to getting out the vote.
In fact, although registered women voters in the western coastal state outnumber their male counterparts by nearly 20,000 (out of a total registered voting pool of about 1.1 million), the majority of Goa’s women have traditionally preferred to sit out the elections rather than head to the polls.
But this year, the state electoral office decided to try a new approach to entice women to participate in the state assembly elections held last Saturday, Feb. 4.
In a blatant act of pay-to-get-them-to-play tactics, the organizers came up with a clever scheme to offer pink teddy bears to all female first-time voters as an incentive to ink their fingers and cast a ballot.
In each of the state’s 40 constituencies, a special pink polling station — staffed by women dressed in blushing flamingo gowns and rose-colored saris — handed out the bears as part of an overall effort to make the electoral process more inclusive.
And from the looks of it, the plush-the-vote strategy paid off, with electoral officials reporting between a 2 and 5 percent increase at pink polling stations as compared to regular polling booths.
The pink teddies represented a relatively minor investment on the part of the state electoral office, since the toys were purchased wholesalers in New Delhi for the token fee of about 87 cents apiece.
There have been critics of the scheme, some of whom maintain that the teddy bears constituted bribes (although male first-time voters also got a prize — albeit less huggable — in the form of a ballpoint pen) and exploited stereotypes of women being shallow and apolitical.
But the fact of the matter is the Goa’s political system has historically been stilted against women.
Just as a point of reference, of the 251 candidates in this year’s election, only 19 were women.
And in the last state assembly elections, held in 2012, 432,000 females showed to vote, with 83,000 registered women not voting.
This year, according to provisional figures released by Goan electoral office officials, there was an overall 83 percent voter turnout.
It should also be noted that the get-out-the-voter campaign did not focus exclusively on women, since the Goa electoral office also organized free to-and-fro transport service for the state’s 3,000 disabled and visually challenged populations.
And, for the first time, the office sent out more than 800 absentee ballots through an electronic transferable postal program to Goans living in other parts of the country-
It likewise launched a massive media campaign with outreach workshops to ensure that every eligible voter had a chance to participate.
Plushing the vote may be a little unorthodox, but if it can ultimately help the Goa electoral office to achieve its goal of a 90 percent voter turnout, who’s going to argue with giving away a few thousand teddy bears?
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected]
