Does giving voters goodies help to get their votes? In Malawi they think so:

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda is betting voters in her poor African nation will rank cows and corn flour ahead of economic tumult and corruption allegations in Tuesday’s elections….

To sweeten the deal for eight million registered voters, most of whom are poor farmers, she spent the past few months giving away hundreds of cows and thousands of 100-pound bags of corn flour at rallies across the country….

“This old-school electoral patronage, a-cow-for-every family, is effective with female voters especially,” said Anne Fruhauf, vice president at the risk-analysis firm Teneo Intelligence. “No one else is courting that half of the electorate.”

As it turns out, this may not have worked as well as observers expected. Banda, running behind in early returns, annulled the election and called another for 90 days later. But clearly she and many other people thought that the distribution of cows would help her chances.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, elected officials prefer to stick with the tried-and-true distribution of cash from the federal Treasury, as the Washington Post reports today:

One of [Sen. Mary] Landrieu’s television ads this spring stars shipbuilder Boysie Bollinger, a longtime GOP fundraiser and activist. As Bollinger walks through his shipyard in a hard hat, he says into the camera, “Louisiana can’t afford to lose Mary Landrieu,” adding that her energy committee post “means more boats, more jobs and more oil and gas. She does big things for Louisiana.”

Bollinger Shipyards, which employs 3,000 people in Lockport, has been a big beneficiary of Landrieu’s largesse. Last fall, she helped secure a $250 million federal contract for Bollinger to rebuild Coast Guard cutters.

It might be cheaper just to give away cows. But cows or contracts, politicians buy votes with taxpayers’ dollars.