YB Kota Belud, electoral roll is not your child’s buku salinan

ARCHIVES 2011

By admin-s On Jul 5, 2011

By Air Kosong

YB Abdul Rahman Dahlan of Kota Belud wrote in length on his blog in defence of the Election Commission (EC), “Sorry, you don’t convince me Ambiga”. YB Khairy Jamaluddin of Rembau, who currently is conspicuously absent from the country on some flotilla mission, quickly tweeted “Fantastic article. Intellectually demolishes Bersih”.

It would be fine if YB Rembau actually tweeted “funtastic”, because YB Kota Belud seemed having fun writing the article by taking the electoral roll lightly. If these two YBs are the remaining intellectual YBs left in the ruling class UMNO, producing such intellectually deficient article, no wonder the sorry state of Malaysia in all fronts. (And adding in the endemic, Malaysia is an aspiring Zimbabwe in the making.)

YB Kota Belud effectively saw the electoral roll like his child’s buku salinan, where one practises new words, repeats them (in the case of the electoral roll, literally) and crosses out mistakes. The electoral roll is the very foundation of our democracy. It requires almost impeccable accuracy and quality, in order to build confidence and faith in the electoral system. Almost, because honest mistakes and errors in rare occasions are bound to happen for a register of a few million records. More...

It is therefore the prerogative and mission of the EC to achieve such high standard. YB Kota Belud wrote like the spokesperson of the EC, stating that it is the responsibility of Malaysians to inform the EC when their family members pass away and should be removed from the electoral roll. To be fair, it is impossible to expect the EC to ensure zero dead voters on the roll. But it is in its interest to institute mechanisms that will help to ensure that. If the EC is indeed honest and discharges its responsibility honourably, it would have come out with such mechanisms years ago. The truth is, none.

YB Kota Belud, nobody is asking the EC to remove dead voters unilaterally. That would be illegal, as you rightly pointed out. But it takes a mechanism as simple as flagging out voters age 100 and above and subjecting these records for further follow-up and verification with other official records, etc. The world is never perfect and perfect solution is nowhere to be found. But as the saying goes, hendak seribu daya, tak hendak seribu dalih. Actions speak volume than defences and counter-accusation.

I am not an expert in electoral systems, nor am I experienced in poll monitoring. So I am not in the position to comment on your points in support of the current postal vote system. But I have been reading enough on reliable sources of reports that practice on the ground is far from what you described. Examples include non-BN party observers disallowed from observing the polling process, officers casting votes on behalf of their subordinates, and discrepancies between the official number of postal voters and the actual votes cast. We shall not generalise based on these reports, but the number of reports and seriousness of such irregularities are a genuine cause for concern, hence the call for reform of the postal vote system.

True to his colour of an UMNO politician, YB Kota Belud conveniently swept aside the claim by his opposite counterpart YB Azmin Ali that six voters of different ethnicity are registered using the address belonging to Azmin’s mother. Don’t belittle any claims of irregularity, be it from Azmin Ali, or Ahmad, Ah Kow or Muthusamy, for that matter. Especially in this case, the claim is verified true by the EC official. Again, it takes only a simple mechanism to flag out addresses with abnormally high number of voters registered to them and follow up the cases accordingly.

Let me add my own case of different flavour. My parents’ family has been residing on the same address for more than 40 years. We have been voting for Segamat constituency, until another new constituency, Sekijang, was created. Our family was forced to split, literally. Only my eldest sister and my mother remain voters of Segamat, while the rest of us have been conveniently assigned to the new Sekijang seat. How funny it is that when a candidate visit our home, he or she needs to be reminded that some of us are not in his/her constituency. Incidentally, Segamat seat has now become almost an impossibility for the Opposition.

Of course not to forget the 739 double postal voter records that I have uncovered in 2008. Mind you, I am not a full-time programmer or professional data mining expert with access to the full EC database. If I could uncover 278 double records by working on my laptop on a three-hour journey, what could the EC has achieved with a proper data mining exercise against its full database? Talking about EC competency…