Money Politics Dan Integritas Masyarakat Dalam Pemilihan Umum

Political integrity is one of valuable capital for good governance establishment. Vise versa, a low political integrity can make power only became a tool to meet personal and group interest at the expense of public interest. In democracy era, an election is an important factor that can be an instrument to control public authorities. Election aims to create leader and public officials that supposed to have integrity, and the voter’s task was to ensure that their vote has integrity. This article explores the relationship between money politics in an election with their preference in the election and their behavior to the official election results. This article expected to provide recommendations for creating electoral integrity. By using quantitative survey methods, this study was conducted in Kota Padang with a number of respondents as many as 289 people were selected by multistage purposive sampling. Data analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that as many as 71% respondents ever knew (heard or seen) the distribution of money or goods or facilities from election candidates to public just before the election. There are 28 types of items for money or goods or facilities to be shared by the candidate to the voters. Although 56,75% of respondents considered that the public should not do money politic, but 67,8% public would receive from these candidates. Most people refuse to report election violations committed by legislative candidates, incumbent candidate and electoral management bodies officer because they fear to report and did not to interfere with the electoral violations. Although they accept money from political candidates, but they will not necessarily choose those candidates. This study recommends that mechanisms, procedures, and transparency of election management supervision needs to be improved to avoid increasingly acts of fraud. Keywords: money politics, elections, public integrity, political behavio