Rafizi says Pakatan to press for EC reform ‘in court, in the streets, in Parliament’
(TMI) – Pakatan Rakyat (PR) will continue to pressure the government for the Election Commission (EC) to be completely reformed if Malaysia wants to see a clean election the next time around, said PKR director of strategy Rafizi Ramli.
Speaking at a forum on the facts behind PR’s win in popular votes for Election 2013 here last night, Rafizi (picture) said the only way was to continuously fight and apply pressure so that the EC will be completely overhauled and replaced with people who are fair and who believe in clean elections.
“We need the whole EC to be completely reformed, where the chairman down to all its officers are replaced by new officers that are approved by PR and the public to ensure their impartiality,” he said.
He said it was only after the EC was fully reformed that re-elections be held for seats that are proven to have irregularities and fraud, especially the 30 marginal seats.
He told the audience of several hundreds at Komtar that PKR has already assembled a team to probe electoral fraud into several parliamentary and state seats and once enough evidence was gathered, election petitions would be filed.
“We have been told that to file a petition, it would cost up to RM50,000 for each petition per seat and that means the 27 seats we are currently investigating could cost us close to RM1.5 million if we were to file petitions,” he said.
He said this was why the party has to conduct thorough investigations and scrutinise all irregularities on top of gathering enough resources to file the petitions.
