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Tuesday, 23-Mar-2004 10:13 AM The shit floats to the top An old school friend of mine, an army colonel, once told me this story, which of course he meant as a joke. “I was serving in Sabah then and there was a general election going on. One local walked up to the ballot box, put his ballot paper in the box, and started praying to it.” “I asked him what he was doing,” my colonel friend added. “He told me, ‘this is a magic box. We all vote for the opposition. But when they open the box all the votes are in favour of the ruling party’.” In a more serious tone of voice, my colonel friend then admitted that all the soldiers in his camp have to line up in front of the camp commander to cast their ‘postal’ votes, which is done a couple of days before the general election. “Of course they are only allowed to vote for the ruling party,” my friend said. “Since I was the camp commander, I did not have to do the same, so I voted for the opposition.” “There was only one vote for the opposition,” my friend laughed. “And it was my vote.” “A few days later, I was hauled up by (the late) Nik Fakaruddin (the then army chief). He asked me why I had voted for the opposition.” “I asked Nik how he knew it was I who had voted for the opposition?” “Nik replied, ‘who else could it be? All the men have to vote in front of the camp commander. You are the only one who can vote in secret. So it has to be your vote that went to the opposition’.” My friend thought this was a very funny episode in his life and he was keeling over laughing uncontrollably as he related his story. Another old school friend, also a colonel, confirmed the army postal voting procedure. “My captain came up to me with the sack of postal votes and asked me what to do with them. I told him to bring them to my office and assemble a couple of men.” “For the next couple of hours we sat there and marked all the ballot papers, of course in favour of the ruling party. My men never got to vote, we voted for them.” Azmin Ali, Parti Keadilan Nasional’s director of elections, recently met the Election Commission to discuss this blatant abuse of the postal voting system. “Why do we still need to apply this system?” Azmin asked the EC. “After all, the soldiers and police all live in the towns and are no more in the jungle like in the past. They could easily be given time off to go cast their votes.” Quite logical seeing that the polling stations are within walking distance from the army camps and police stations anyway and the police and army personnel are all in their barracks and not in the jungles. The EC’s reply though tells it all. “The postal votes are the ruling party’s only way of retaining power,” the EC replied. “There is no way we will abolish this system.” Last Tuesday, I sneaked into the Putrajaya Police Station to have a peep at how all the police personnel there cast their votes. They all had to line up in front of their senior officer and mark their ballot papers in full view of the officer. Their votes were certainly not a secret and there would be no way they could vote for the opposition. But what was most strange, even though all these police live in Putrajaya, their votes did not appear in the final tally. The only votes that were counted were of those civil servants who turned up to vote at the polling stations on Polling Day. A question that begs asking is; where then did all the Putrajaya police postal votes get sent to? Clearly they were very confident of winning Putrajaya hands down so they did not need those postal votes to help them win. These Putrajaya postal votes must have therefore been sent to another constituency that needed them more. The recently concluded 11th General Election is probably the worst managed election in Malaysian history. Is this a reflection of the EC’s incompetence or is this proof of massive rigging? Many complained when they went to vote in the morning their names were missing. When they went back in the afternoon, however, they were able to vote as their names, surprisingly, were on the list again. Then there were many incidences of voters not being able to find their names when they went to the EC booth (barong). But when they went to the Barisan Nasional booth (pondok panas), lo and behold their names were there. This can only mean one thing: the EC had a separate list from that in the BN pondok panas. The trick is, if you go to the BN booth to check your name, then you must be a BN supporter so you will find you name there and will be told where to vote. If you bypass the BN pondok panas and go straight to the EC barong, then you must be an opposition supporter and your name will be ‘missing’. Is this any wonder that all those thousands all over Malaysia whose names were missing from the electoral role ‘happened’ to be opposition supporters and ‘coincidentally’ all those BN supporters did not suffer this same fate? In the afternoon, some of those opposition supporters -- who could not find their names in the morning -- went to the BN pondok panas masquerading as BN supporters. This time their names were there and they were able to vote. But for the tens of thousands of other opposition supporters who refused to be caught dead at the BN pondok panas, they were not able to vote on Sunday, 21 March 2004, and the opposition was denied their vote. Then there was the incident yesterday where teachers in the Sekolah Menengah Jalan Reko in Kajang, Selangor, found a stack of identity cards hidden in the school, which was one of the polling stations. What were these identity cards doing there? According to Mustapha Ali, the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) is compiling evidence of massive vote rigging and rampant cheating in Terengganu and would be taking legal action against the EC. PAS will also attempt to get the election declared null and press for new elections. In the meantime, hundreds of buses ferrying thousands of voters from outside Terengganu have been detected all over the state. Details of these buses and ‘phantom’ voters are being recorded as evidence in the legal action being planned. With this revelation of election rigging in Terengganu, it makes sense how the ruling party was able to almost make a clean sweep of the state.
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