Presidential voting season in the U.S. has it's own quirks. The media goes wild. Yard signs. Bumperstickers. Talk Shows. Commercials. Newspaper and Web ads. Obama/Biden. McCain/Palin. It's everywhere yelling for our attention. But we're not alone in the world. Brazil has it's own loud political clamour. And the Team is seeing it first hand.
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In Brazilian elections the trick is to stand out in what is a very crowded field. Brazil allows candidates to register under any name and many pick the most bizarre in order to grab attention. Among the more than 350,000 candidates in the current local elections races "were such familiar names as Barak Obama, Bin Laden, DJ Saddam, Bill Clinton and Jorge Bushi," writes traveling journalist Tom Hennigan, (The Irish Times).
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"In Rio de Janeiro Santa Claus was battling it out for a seat on the city council with Tarzan and US 1960s radical Jerry Rubin. Two brothers running for mayor and councilman for the ruling Workers Party registered as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, allowing them to plaster their home town with red posters asking voters to elect Marx and Engels. More than 200 candidates renamed themselves after the country's wildly popular president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva."
.And for the last couple of weeks loud and free-roaming campaign trucks have been driving the streets, blaring campaign slogans and propaganda from huge speakers afixed to the tops of the vehicles. Last week, Christian mentioned the trucks to me as a being common part of their daily lives in Brazil.
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Yesterday, while the three guys were doing a skype session with a crowd in Woodland Park Colorado, "about 129 million Brazilian voters went to the polls to elect mayors and 52,137 councilors at 5,563 municipalities. The Brazil elections began at 8 a.m. local time and concluded at 5 p.m." (AP) Votes will be counted today, and final results will be announced tonight at midnight.
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Which reminds me...
Have you voted on the latest Blog Poll? 4 Days left to vote.
Check it out.
~KjL
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