Voting - Right or Responsibility??

This Sunday will be elections for the Governor of the province of Santa Fe and Intendente (mayor, I think) of the city of Rosario. Voting is obligatory in Argentina. You must vote unless you are more than 500 kilometers away, in which case you must go to the local police station wherever you are on election day and have them stamp your identity document approving your failure to vote. Missionaries that are called to missions not that far away have to travel home on election days... If you don't have the ID document stamped as either having voted or checked-in, no one knows what will happen, but everyone assumes that not voting would give a government official/policeman/customs agent the right to make your life difficult any time they should so desire so it's better just to go vote. Some people go to the voting booths, get their stamps, and then turn in blank ballets because they don't want to vote.

In preparation for election day, almost every street in Rosario has been repaved, stop-lights are going up, and garbage pick-up has been better than usual. Apparently stroller-pushing pedestrians are not a significant constituency because the sidewalks are still total crap. What I'm confused about though, is that the incumbent is not running, so I'm not sure who all these last-minute fixes are meant to help.

In case the improvements are not enough to sway voters, really annoying people ride around with megaphones promoting one candidate or another. Below are two we saw today while driving and I made Mario stop so I could take a picture so I would have something to blog about. He clearly was thrilled to be the subject of an internationally-read blog(according to statcounter I have visitors from 5 countries, I would be very happy if my readers from Australia identified themselves!) so gave me his best pose.
This is the truck that I swear passes by my house every morning at about 7:30 am. Does he not understand that if I could understand what he was saying, and if I could vote, I would specifically NOT vote for him for annoying me so early in the morning???
My favorite comment of the day was Mario when I was taking the pictures, "You're going to put those on your blog and your friends are going to think we live in Bolivia." Because Bolivia is a crappy south american country, whereas Argentina is an upscale south american country. I assured him that no one would think it was Bolivia, they would just think that Argentina was that crappy!!