Online Election Campaigning Leads to Corruption. Huh?

Here's PM Lee spouting mysterious words again:

ST April 14, 2008
Laws must keep up with changing new media, says PM
But any loosening up will be handled cautiously, he adds

THE new media is changing rapidly and Singapore's laws must evolve to keep up, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said.

But any loosening up will be done carefully.

Otherwise, misinformation and extremist views could proliferate.

Politics might also become tainted by graft if parties have to spend large sums to campaign online, he warned.

I wonder what that is supposed to mean.

It is very difficult to see how one can spend large sums of money campaigning online. In Malaysia's recent elections, the Internet played a huge role in influencing voters. Yet practically all the Internet activity took place via Blogger, Wordpress, Youtube and other completely free Internet platforms.

Contrast this with campaigning offline. You would have to spend money printing and distributing posters; placing advertisements in traditional newspapers; hiring lorries and drivers to ferry candidates around the country to meet the electorate; and making large-scale logistics arrangements for election rallies. That won't be cheap.

Anyway, suppose we accept PM Lee's strange logic - that politics might become tainted by corruption if parties have to spend large sums to campaign online. It must then follow that since traditional, offline campaigning costs much more money, it is even more likely to lead to corruption.

Then we wonder - how come this seems to be an issue in Singapore only? After all, election campaigning occurs in every democratic nation on this planet. In fact, campaigning is a necessary part of the democratic process. Yet no one ever seems to says that democracy breeds corruption.

No one except PM Lee, that is.

Current laws disallow the making and distributing of party political films.

During campaign season, political parties are not allowed to put audio or video-casts on their websites.

Mr Lee warned that Singapore would suffer if elections came to be fought through expensive online films and advertisements.

'If a party needs money, many people are willing to donate, but these political contributions never come with no strings attached. After you win and come into power, the donors will turn up politely to 'collect their dues',' he said.

Oooh, I see. PM Lee is worried about expensive online films and advertisements.

So, hypothetically speaking, suppose an Opposition candidate merely uses his own cheap, lousy video camera at home to film his own speech, and then he posts the video on Youtube, where it is widely viewed by Singaporeans. PM Lee shouldn't be worried about that, should he?

Heheh. Well, think what you like. And draw your own conclusions. Mr Wang is only here to encourage you to think.
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How To Make Singapore Look More Tech-Savvy Than It Really Is

Basically all you have to do is make the wild claim that every grandmother, grandfather, uncle and auntie who has a phone in his/her home is also an Internet user.

Alas, the truth eventually emerges, as it usually will. And it's a rather embarrassing truth:

ST Dec 25, 2007
End of free Net access to spell 1m dip in user figures
That's because IDA counts all SingTel home phone customers as subscribers of mysingtel service, which will be withdrawn in April
By Irene Tham

THIS is not an early April Fool's joke. On April 1 next year, close to one million Internet dial-up subscribtions in Singapore could 'disappear'.

It raises a poser about one set of figures Singapore has used in claiming to be among the world's most wired cities, although this claim holds, thanks to other criteria and widespread broadband penetration here.

SingTel, which owns most residential phone lines here, ends its free Web access service, available to all these customers, on April 1.

Called mysingtel, the dial-up service was launched in early 2000, before broadband really caught on. It meant that every residential phone line could be connected to the Net, for the price of a local phone call - provided everyone signed up for mysingtel.

The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has, in fact, been including every residential phone line in its 'dial-up Internet subscription' figures, The Straits Times understands.

It now seems that even non-users of mysingtel were counted in: Internet subscription figures reflected anyone with a residential phone line.

Hence, Singapore's dial-up base almost tripled in two months from December 1999, after mysingtel's launch. In February 2000, IDA recorded about 1.7 million dial-up subscribers islandwide, or a population penetration rate of 52 per cent.

And let's take a look at how the IDA used such data to toot its own horn:

............ IDA started to publish broadband subscription data on its website only in January 2003, and continued to use the dial-up subscription figures to show how wired Singapore was.

The numbers were published in IDA's annual reports that highlight key national infocomm developments. Dial-up figures were also quoted by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in its Economic Survey of Singapore 2002 and 2003 reports.

Come April 1, SingTel's 938,000 fixed-line residential customers, of whom only 7,000 are active mysingtel users, will have to be excluded from IDA's dial-up subscription figures.

A few views from industry observers:

.............. Mr Jonathan Coham, a consumer group analyst at British-based research firm Ovum, said that counting non-users 'will artificially inflate numbers'.

Mr Tim Johnson, chief analyst at British-based research and consultancy firm Point Topic, said: 'This conceals the fact that many people in Singapore may not be using the Internet.'

The moral of the story? The next time you hear the Singapore government make any grand claims - "world's best public transport"; "world's least corrupt government"; "world's most efficient public service"; "world's leading hub in X, Y or Z" - scrutinise the data. Or at least take the claim with a big pinch of salt.
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