Tindak Malaysia demands the EC Chairman, Deputy Chairman and Secretary resign to take responsibility for the indelible ink fiasco

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On May 16, 2013

PY Wong

Election Commission’s Ajaran Sesat is seen from the way it is prepared to mislead the rakyat about the use of indelible ink. Here is the response from PY Wong (for the Chinese press, 黄炳耀), founder of Tindak Malaysia:

It was reported by The Malaysian Insider (http://bit.ly/TMIIndelibleInk) that EC Chairman Abdul Aziz had announced in Dec 2011 that the EC would use silver nitrate indelible ink for the general elections. Indonesian Election Watchdog, ANFREL, stated that silver nitrate up to 4% concentration was safe and that Indonesia spent US 2.7 million to buy 1,149,890 bottles of indelible ink for 574,945 polling stations (2 bottles per station) in the Indonesian Presidential Election, 2009. http://bit.ly/1011c46

ANFREL Bangkok explained that the indelible ink needed 30 seconds to dry and can last up to 4 days. http://bit.ly/AnfrelBKKIndelibleInk Then India’s EC on 29th Sept 2011 warned that ink used on voters will be easily removable if poor quality indelible ink is used. http://bit.ly/IndelibleInkIndianEC

Silver nitrate will stain the skin and the nail, making the stain indelible. While the stain on the skin commonly last up to 3 days, depending on the concentration of silver nitrate used, the stain on the nail will last until the nail grows out. We invite the public to examine their nails to see if there is any stain there. If not, you know that silver nitrate was not used as promised. Then what ink did the EC really use?

The function of the indelible ink is a check to prevent double voting. Because there are concerns that advanced voters vote more than once using their police/military authority cards and their personal Identity Cards, the indelible ink is to alert the Election Commission clerks and the polling agents of people voting twice.

In most countries, ink is applied after voting. We recommended this repeatedly to the EC. This is in contrast to the EC’s insistence on marking before voting. This will create risk of dirtying the voting slips thereby delaying the voting process and creating confusion as to the validity of the ballot paper. Now that we have found that the ink was not indelible as promised, the EC has come up with all sorts of excuses:

It doesn’t matter. The voter will not be able to vote twice in the same polling station.

But the worry was never about voting twice in the same polling station. No voter is that stupid. The worry is about a voter using another MyKad to vote elsewhere undetected because the ink on the finger has been removed.

Now here’s an even more ridiculous excuse by the Deputy EC Chairman. http://bit.ly/TheStarIndelibleInk Their audacity is incredible!

“The people must understand that we were using indelible ink for the first time, and surely there would have been shortcomings. We appointed a well-known company to produce the ink for GE13.
“Some 250,000 bottles of indelible ink were booked two months before GE13,” he said.

That is 10 bottles per station! Five times the quantity used by Indonesia. It is outrageous that after years reminding them to have an open procurement process to avoid problems, they got into the exact problems we feared – indelible ink that did not work and purchased at horrendous cost. This cannot be allowed to go on!

Tindak Malaysia demands that the Election Commission chairman and his team resign en bloc to allow a total revamp of the Election Commission.

To mislead the people and squander millions of Ringgit (more than RM 6 million) of public funds to procure ‘indelible’ ink that cannot serve its function as indelible ink is, we believe, a criminal breach of trust. A number of police reports have been lodged against the Election Commission, and Tindak Malaysia hereby urge the Royal Malaysia Police and the MACC to investigate Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof (chairman), Wan Ahmad Wan Omar (deputy chairman) and Kamaruddin Baria (secretary)

Tindak Malaysia also urge the EC to explain why the ink could be removed so easily instead of pointing fingers on the public for proving that the ink is removable. For once, can the EC come clean? Did they use indelible ink or not?