pywong
23rd April 2010, 02:17 AM
New Threats to the Electoral System
The last remaining democratic institution is under siege
by Francis Loh
elections On April 8, 2002 another set of amendments to Malaysia’s election laws was passed in Parliament, again with hardly any public discussion or consultation. Upon learning of the proposed amendments, Aliran issued a media statement on March 22. A group of 24 NGOs including Aliran then prepared a joint statement. To highlight the severity of these undemocratic amendments, representatives of the NGOs went to Parliament on March 27 in an attempt to present the joint statement to certain members of parliament. As usual, the mainstream media did not carry Aliran’s statement. A little news item in several dailies reported the presence of the NGO representatives in Parliament but merely highlighted the ruckus caused when they tried to have a press conference there. There was hardly any mention of the contents of the joint statement.
By design or by default, much of public attention was diverted by the mass media towards the Ketari by-election and the MCA Team A-Team B quarrels instead. Even in parliament only 86 (out of 193) parliamentarians were present when the Bill was passed; 63 voted in favour, 23 opposed. The Opposition’s attempt to amend the Bill failed. Yet the consequences of these amendments could not be more serious for Malaysia’s already tottering democracy.
Non-level Playing Field
Malaysians are well aware of the non-level playing field that characterises our electoral process. As elections approach, Malaysians see clearly the Barisan Nasional (BN)’s monopoly and manipulation of the media, its access and abuse of government facilities and funds, and its possession of huge electoral war chests, which allow the BN parties to outspend its challengers.
In between elections, the BN’s elected representatives have access to so-called “constituency development funds” to finance their favoured minor capital works projects and/or to sponsor programmes of particular schools, associations, religious organisations, residential communities, etc. Such funds are denied to elected opposition representatives. This is a blatant disregard of the required equal treatment of all elected representatives as enshrined in any notion of parliamentary democracy.
Yet most Malaysians still consider the electoral process as an important feature of our constitutional system of government; not least because it is the one remaining democratic institution that is still beyond the grip of the Executive. Here, the unpredictable can occur, at least at the constituency level, if not at the state level.
Laws About Elections
Five different election laws and regulations are currently in place in the country. These are the:
* Election Act 1958;
* Election Offences Act 1954;
* Election Commission Act 1957;
* Elections (Conduct of Elections) Regulations 1981; and
* Elections (Registration of Electors) Regulations 1974.
The Acts are statutory or primary laws which require parliament’s assent while the Regulations are secondary laws which do not necessarily require parliamentary assent. Apart from these, various parts of the Federal Constitution are also concerned with electoral matters. Articles 48-54 discuss the workings of Parliament and the Members of Parliament. Articles 113-120 discuss the specifics of Malaysia’s first-past-the-post or simple majority electoral system including the role of the Elections Commission (SPR). The 13th Schedule (added to the Constitution in 1962) contains principles for the de-lineation of constituencies including the controversial concept of “rural weightage”.
Incidentally, there also used to be laws for conducting local authority elections which used to be a feature of Malaysia’s democracy in the 1950s up to the early 1960s. Ostensibly because of konfrontasi with Indonesia, all local government elections were suspended in 1964. Despite calls by the opposition, and by the Athi Nahappan Royal Commission of Inquiry (set up by the government to look into the workings of local authorities) for the re-introduction of local elections, these elections were abolished through an Act of Parliament in 1974. Significantly, the opposition used to win many of these local government elections not only in the new villages but in major towns like Georgetown, Ipoh and Malacca.
Indeed, the BN has progressively amended the Constitution, the election laws and regulations so as to tighten its grip over the electoral process and thereby eliminate the ultimate surprise: a change of government from the BN to an opposition one at the federal level. It is the Election Act and the Election Offences Act that are the focus of this round of amendments.
Election Act Amendments
Three aspects of the amendments are particularly insidious.
First, any questioning of the electoral rolls is to be denied in future. The amendment states that once the rolls have been gazetted, they become “final and shall not be questioned or appealed against or reviewed, quashed or set aside by any court” [Section 9(A) of the Election (Amendment) Bill 2002].
No doubt this amendment follows on the heels of what transpired in the case of Election Petition No K11 of 1999 in Kota Kinabalu. Following submissions by the petitioner on the illegality of the 1998 electoral roll for Likas, which in the words of the presiding judge “found corroboration in the testimony of the [SPR’s] Registering Officer, Likas” among others, Justice Datuk Hj Muhammad Kamil bin Awang upheld the petition. He ruled that there were numerous “instances of non-citizens and phantom voters in the electoral roll”, and so declared the victory of the BN candidate in Likas null and void (see AM vol 21, no 6 for an abridged version of the judgment).
The issue at hand is whether the Election Commission (SPR) can guarantee that the electoral rolls are up-to-date, clean and devoid of phantom voters. Naturally, the SPR will claim that its rolls are in order, as it did prior to the March 1999 Sabah state election. In fact, as the Court has ruled, the electoral rolls were polluted with phantoms.
Hence, if the SPR cannot guarantee that the electoral rolls are in order, and Malaysians are denied the right to question the state of these rolls, including in a Court of Law, where does this leave Malaysians who still believe in the electoral process? What kind of a democracy are we practising if phantom voters can cast their ballots and yet we cannot prevent them from doing so?
A second amendment concerns the compensation payable to any person aggrieved as a result of an objection made to the inclusion of his or her name on the electoral roll “without reasonable cause”, that is, if a complaint is made about the inclusion of a registered voter on the rolls but it cannot be proven that the voter is a phantom one. The compensation has been increased from RM200 to RM1,000.
As a result of this amendment, identifying suspected phantom voters and thus cleaning up the rolls will not only entail much tedious work as is now the case, but could potentially cost a lot of money as well. As the various actions taken by Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj and his Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) team in 1999-2001 to clean the Sungai Siput electoral rolls reveal, it is possible but time consuming to prove that a registered voter is actually a phantom voter. For the record, their petition in the Taiping High Court was dismissed on a trivial technical point after three days of hearing. However, their request for a Public Inquiry under the auspices of the Registration of Voters Regulations proved successful. Out of 339 objections, it was proven that 330 were phantom voters who did not reside at the addresses given in the SPR electoral rolls (For more details see AM vol 20, nos 3 and 11/12).
The shame of it all is that the responsible citizen who tries to eliminate phantom voters from the rolls could end up being punished financially. On the other hand, those who have allowed themselves to be registered as phantom voters or those officials who registered the phantom voters into the rolls in the first place, it appears, get off scot free! Why is there no similar punitive action against these phantom voters and the SPR officials who registered them. The larger goal should be to ensure free and fair elections and to entrench our democracy. The rakyat should be encouraged to help the SPR eliminate these phantoms, a task which the SPR is obviously not capable of ensuring on its own at this time.
The third amendment pertains to the sharp increase in the deposit required of contesting candidates: up from RM5,000 to RM20,000. Moreover, the candidate must now put up another deposit of RM10,000 to ensure prompt removal of posters and other paraphernalia after the election. There is no justification for this sharp increase. As it is, the present deposit required is already much higher than that in most other countries including Britain, Australia and Canada (see Table).
One can only surmise that the increase is intended not simply to exclude the poor but in particular to burden and inconvenience the poorer opposition parties. On the other hand, the increase is a drop in the bucket for the BN parties, which list among their assets fancy party headquarters, media empires, colleges and now universities and various other companies, listed and unlisted. They are also never short of donations from wealthy tycoons and party members.
Election Offences Act Amendments
In line with the last point above, it is especially significant that section 19 of the Election Offences Act has also been amended to introduce new spending limits for the candidates. For a state legislative seat, a candidate may now spend up to RM100,000, up from the current RM30,000; while for a parliamentary seat, the candidate may spend up to RM200,000, up from RM50,000. In fact, this particular amendment regularises current practices especially of the BN candidates, which casual observation of previous elections readily reveals, entailed spending in excess of the upper limits allowed.
Table: Deposits required from election candidates in selected countries
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/pp242/tindakmalaysia/politics/electiondepositsbyvariouscountries.jpg
Source: The Administration and Cost of Elections Project (United Nations, the International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the International Foundation for Election Systems).
Ask the voters of Sabah and Sarawak! Do a quick and rough addition of the free banquets provided; the freebies – water pumps and tanks, outboard motors, bicycles, plans and zinc for housing - handed out; the costs of hiring vehicles – cars, 4-wheel drives, vans, motor-boats, not to mention helicopters; and providing tambang (fares) to voters to return home to vote. There have always also been cash handouts.
A recent rough count by the opposition of the BN’s expenses in the Indera Kayangan by-election produced an estimate of RM1.14 million for the nine-day campaign. The costs included: two million plastic party flags, 50 billboards, 6,000 banners, 2,000 T-shirts bearing the BN logo, 10 days of banquet dinners, and lodging for some 1,000 party workers. Another RM25 million worth of development and town-planning projects such as low-cost housing schemes, were also promised. (But that’s a different story, or is it?)
No doubt, as the original Bill suggested, the amendment is necessary because the current spending limits are “unrealistic”. But just because the candidates have been spending over those limits in the past, and the SPR has not been hauling them up, doesn’t mean there is a need to increase those limits. To ensure that elections in Malaysia are not monopolised by the wealthy, who with their free-flowing cash might be inclined to turn this serious matter of elections into spectacles of spending or, God forbid, circuses, it is wise not to increase these upper spending limits. For the spending will soon surpass the new upper limits, and on-and-on.
Creating Ill-Will, Discontent or Hostility
Another amendment, a whole new Section 4A, makes it an offence “to act or to make any statement with a view or with a tendency to promote feelings of ill-will, discontent or hostility between persons of the same race or different races or of the same class or different classes of the population of Malaysia in order to induce any elector or voter to vote or refrain from voting at an election or to procure or endeavour to procure the election of any person”.
This particular clause is so loosely worded and yet so all encompassing that it offends Malaysians who take their elections seriously. Now that it’s passed, virtually all criticism of the BN government by the opposition, or by non-partisan NGOs attempting to refocus the voters’ attention on serious issues can be interpreted as an offence. How then will the opposition conduct its campaign if it cannot expose the government’s scandals and wrong-doings and criticise its policies and programmes? Can we still talk about how the government bailed out its cronies with funds which actually belong to the rakyat? What if we unearth evidence of Maika-Talikom proportions? Or of the UEM-Renong hanky-panky? There is also much statistical evidence of widening disparities between the rich and poor in Malaysia within all the communities: what if the fact is made an electoral issue?
Or will criticism of Mahathir’s September 2001 pronouncement of Malaysia as an Islamic state be deemed an electoral offence? What if Suqiu reminds the voters of how Mahathir unfairly likenend them to terrorists? Will opposition to the government’s Vision School programme and criticism of its lag in permitting the re-location of Chinese primary schools from the city centres to the suburbs or other locales be construed as contravening the law? And what if UMNO leaders are criticised for deviating from Islamic injunctions of pursuing truth, justice and equity?
In raising these issues, some people somewhere in Malaysia will surely experience “ill-will, discontent or hostility”. Who then decides if the law has been broken ? Obviously, some party loyalist will file the police report. The Police will then investigate the alleged wrong-doing and the Attorney General’s Chambers will then decide whether the matter should go to Court or not. Theoretically, one could see as many BN as well as opposition (and NGO) personalities being hauled up. Realistically, however, it is most likely that those cases that do go to court will surely come from only one side. We did say, after all, that the electoral process is the last remaining democratic institution. No doubt this law is meant to further muzzle the opposition.
Other Offences
Necessarily some sections of the Election Offences Act have also been amended so as to be in tandem with amendments to the Election Act. For instance, henceforth, a petitioner cannot make a claim for a declaration that any candidate was duly elected and ought to have been returned. A new Section 35A stipulates that the trial of every election petition shall be completed not later than six months after the petition has been presented. Finally, a petitioner can no longer ask the court to declare that an aggrieved candidate “was duly elected and ought to have been returned.”
Section 3 has also been amended so that it will be an offence to obstruct or prevent a voter who is entitled to vote from voting at an election. Anyone who votes at more than one polling station whether in the same or different constituency also commits an offence. The maximum punishment is five years jail and/or RM10,000 fine; and a person so convicted shall vacate his seat (if any) and be barred from voting or contesting for five years.
Another amendment increases the penalties for corrupt practices (section 5) “to ensure that the punishment is commensurate with the offence”. The maximum term of imprisonment which, depending on the offence used to range from six to 12 months, has been increased to one to two years, depending on the offence, and the maximum fine ranging from RM500-RM1,000 has been increased to RM2,000-RM5,000.
Involving the Rakyat
Instead of indulging in the politics of exclusion and denial, the BN government should endeavour to make politics accessible to all. As suggested above, the rakyat could also be recruited to assist the SPR as “ghost-busters”. Without even amending any laws, the government should direct the SPR. (which it controls in reality) to look into issues such as:
* rectifying the mal-apportionment of the constituencies: some urban constituencies are more than four times bigger than the rural ones (in terms of population size), thereby undermining the principle of one man one vote;
* providing fair access to the mass media and curbing lies and misinformation in the media;
* insisting on a public declaration of electoral finances by all candidates;
* providing for longer campaign periods so that the people can be informed of the issues; and
* allowing the holding of open-air rallies in addition to ceramahs.
It will be a long wait before the BN delivers on such reforms. Ultimately, ordinary Malaysians like us must wake up to push for these reforms ourselves. Otherwise, we might find ourselves either registered as phantom voters or being ruled ‘irrelevant’ vis-à-vis the electoral process. We must prevent this last remaining democratic institution - warts and all - from falling into the hands of the Executive. Aliran. (http://www.aliran.com/oldsite/monthly/2002/3c.html)
The last remaining democratic institution is under siege
by Francis Loh
elections On April 8, 2002 another set of amendments to Malaysia’s election laws was passed in Parliament, again with hardly any public discussion or consultation. Upon learning of the proposed amendments, Aliran issued a media statement on March 22. A group of 24 NGOs including Aliran then prepared a joint statement. To highlight the severity of these undemocratic amendments, representatives of the NGOs went to Parliament on March 27 in an attempt to present the joint statement to certain members of parliament. As usual, the mainstream media did not carry Aliran’s statement. A little news item in several dailies reported the presence of the NGO representatives in Parliament but merely highlighted the ruckus caused when they tried to have a press conference there. There was hardly any mention of the contents of the joint statement.
By design or by default, much of public attention was diverted by the mass media towards the Ketari by-election and the MCA Team A-Team B quarrels instead. Even in parliament only 86 (out of 193) parliamentarians were present when the Bill was passed; 63 voted in favour, 23 opposed. The Opposition’s attempt to amend the Bill failed. Yet the consequences of these amendments could not be more serious for Malaysia’s already tottering democracy.
Non-level Playing Field
Malaysians are well aware of the non-level playing field that characterises our electoral process. As elections approach, Malaysians see clearly the Barisan Nasional (BN)’s monopoly and manipulation of the media, its access and abuse of government facilities and funds, and its possession of huge electoral war chests, which allow the BN parties to outspend its challengers.
In between elections, the BN’s elected representatives have access to so-called “constituency development funds” to finance their favoured minor capital works projects and/or to sponsor programmes of particular schools, associations, religious organisations, residential communities, etc. Such funds are denied to elected opposition representatives. This is a blatant disregard of the required equal treatment of all elected representatives as enshrined in any notion of parliamentary democracy.
Yet most Malaysians still consider the electoral process as an important feature of our constitutional system of government; not least because it is the one remaining democratic institution that is still beyond the grip of the Executive. Here, the unpredictable can occur, at least at the constituency level, if not at the state level.
Laws About Elections
Five different election laws and regulations are currently in place in the country. These are the:
* Election Act 1958;
* Election Offences Act 1954;
* Election Commission Act 1957;
* Elections (Conduct of Elections) Regulations 1981; and
* Elections (Registration of Electors) Regulations 1974.
The Acts are statutory or primary laws which require parliament’s assent while the Regulations are secondary laws which do not necessarily require parliamentary assent. Apart from these, various parts of the Federal Constitution are also concerned with electoral matters. Articles 48-54 discuss the workings of Parliament and the Members of Parliament. Articles 113-120 discuss the specifics of Malaysia’s first-past-the-post or simple majority electoral system including the role of the Elections Commission (SPR). The 13th Schedule (added to the Constitution in 1962) contains principles for the de-lineation of constituencies including the controversial concept of “rural weightage”.
Incidentally, there also used to be laws for conducting local authority elections which used to be a feature of Malaysia’s democracy in the 1950s up to the early 1960s. Ostensibly because of konfrontasi with Indonesia, all local government elections were suspended in 1964. Despite calls by the opposition, and by the Athi Nahappan Royal Commission of Inquiry (set up by the government to look into the workings of local authorities) for the re-introduction of local elections, these elections were abolished through an Act of Parliament in 1974. Significantly, the opposition used to win many of these local government elections not only in the new villages but in major towns like Georgetown, Ipoh and Malacca.
Indeed, the BN has progressively amended the Constitution, the election laws and regulations so as to tighten its grip over the electoral process and thereby eliminate the ultimate surprise: a change of government from the BN to an opposition one at the federal level. It is the Election Act and the Election Offences Act that are the focus of this round of amendments.
Election Act Amendments
Three aspects of the amendments are particularly insidious.
First, any questioning of the electoral rolls is to be denied in future. The amendment states that once the rolls have been gazetted, they become “final and shall not be questioned or appealed against or reviewed, quashed or set aside by any court” [Section 9(A) of the Election (Amendment) Bill 2002].
No doubt this amendment follows on the heels of what transpired in the case of Election Petition No K11 of 1999 in Kota Kinabalu. Following submissions by the petitioner on the illegality of the 1998 electoral roll for Likas, which in the words of the presiding judge “found corroboration in the testimony of the [SPR’s] Registering Officer, Likas” among others, Justice Datuk Hj Muhammad Kamil bin Awang upheld the petition. He ruled that there were numerous “instances of non-citizens and phantom voters in the electoral roll”, and so declared the victory of the BN candidate in Likas null and void (see AM vol 21, no 6 for an abridged version of the judgment).
The issue at hand is whether the Election Commission (SPR) can guarantee that the electoral rolls are up-to-date, clean and devoid of phantom voters. Naturally, the SPR will claim that its rolls are in order, as it did prior to the March 1999 Sabah state election. In fact, as the Court has ruled, the electoral rolls were polluted with phantoms.
Hence, if the SPR cannot guarantee that the electoral rolls are in order, and Malaysians are denied the right to question the state of these rolls, including in a Court of Law, where does this leave Malaysians who still believe in the electoral process? What kind of a democracy are we practising if phantom voters can cast their ballots and yet we cannot prevent them from doing so?
A second amendment concerns the compensation payable to any person aggrieved as a result of an objection made to the inclusion of his or her name on the electoral roll “without reasonable cause”, that is, if a complaint is made about the inclusion of a registered voter on the rolls but it cannot be proven that the voter is a phantom one. The compensation has been increased from RM200 to RM1,000.
As a result of this amendment, identifying suspected phantom voters and thus cleaning up the rolls will not only entail much tedious work as is now the case, but could potentially cost a lot of money as well. As the various actions taken by Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj and his Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) team in 1999-2001 to clean the Sungai Siput electoral rolls reveal, it is possible but time consuming to prove that a registered voter is actually a phantom voter. For the record, their petition in the Taiping High Court was dismissed on a trivial technical point after three days of hearing. However, their request for a Public Inquiry under the auspices of the Registration of Voters Regulations proved successful. Out of 339 objections, it was proven that 330 were phantom voters who did not reside at the addresses given in the SPR electoral rolls (For more details see AM vol 20, nos 3 and 11/12).
The shame of it all is that the responsible citizen who tries to eliminate phantom voters from the rolls could end up being punished financially. On the other hand, those who have allowed themselves to be registered as phantom voters or those officials who registered the phantom voters into the rolls in the first place, it appears, get off scot free! Why is there no similar punitive action against these phantom voters and the SPR officials who registered them. The larger goal should be to ensure free and fair elections and to entrench our democracy. The rakyat should be encouraged to help the SPR eliminate these phantoms, a task which the SPR is obviously not capable of ensuring on its own at this time.
The third amendment pertains to the sharp increase in the deposit required of contesting candidates: up from RM5,000 to RM20,000. Moreover, the candidate must now put up another deposit of RM10,000 to ensure prompt removal of posters and other paraphernalia after the election. There is no justification for this sharp increase. As it is, the present deposit required is already much higher than that in most other countries including Britain, Australia and Canada (see Table).
One can only surmise that the increase is intended not simply to exclude the poor but in particular to burden and inconvenience the poorer opposition parties. On the other hand, the increase is a drop in the bucket for the BN parties, which list among their assets fancy party headquarters, media empires, colleges and now universities and various other companies, listed and unlisted. They are also never short of donations from wealthy tycoons and party members.
Election Offences Act Amendments
In line with the last point above, it is especially significant that section 19 of the Election Offences Act has also been amended to introduce new spending limits for the candidates. For a state legislative seat, a candidate may now spend up to RM100,000, up from the current RM30,000; while for a parliamentary seat, the candidate may spend up to RM200,000, up from RM50,000. In fact, this particular amendment regularises current practices especially of the BN candidates, which casual observation of previous elections readily reveals, entailed spending in excess of the upper limits allowed.
Table: Deposits required from election candidates in selected countries
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/pp242/tindakmalaysia/politics/electiondepositsbyvariouscountries.jpg
Source: The Administration and Cost of Elections Project (United Nations, the International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the International Foundation for Election Systems).
Ask the voters of Sabah and Sarawak! Do a quick and rough addition of the free banquets provided; the freebies – water pumps and tanks, outboard motors, bicycles, plans and zinc for housing - handed out; the costs of hiring vehicles – cars, 4-wheel drives, vans, motor-boats, not to mention helicopters; and providing tambang (fares) to voters to return home to vote. There have always also been cash handouts.
A recent rough count by the opposition of the BN’s expenses in the Indera Kayangan by-election produced an estimate of RM1.14 million for the nine-day campaign. The costs included: two million plastic party flags, 50 billboards, 6,000 banners, 2,000 T-shirts bearing the BN logo, 10 days of banquet dinners, and lodging for some 1,000 party workers. Another RM25 million worth of development and town-planning projects such as low-cost housing schemes, were also promised. (But that’s a different story, or is it?)
No doubt, as the original Bill suggested, the amendment is necessary because the current spending limits are “unrealistic”. But just because the candidates have been spending over those limits in the past, and the SPR has not been hauling them up, doesn’t mean there is a need to increase those limits. To ensure that elections in Malaysia are not monopolised by the wealthy, who with their free-flowing cash might be inclined to turn this serious matter of elections into spectacles of spending or, God forbid, circuses, it is wise not to increase these upper spending limits. For the spending will soon surpass the new upper limits, and on-and-on.
Creating Ill-Will, Discontent or Hostility
Another amendment, a whole new Section 4A, makes it an offence “to act or to make any statement with a view or with a tendency to promote feelings of ill-will, discontent or hostility between persons of the same race or different races or of the same class or different classes of the population of Malaysia in order to induce any elector or voter to vote or refrain from voting at an election or to procure or endeavour to procure the election of any person”.
This particular clause is so loosely worded and yet so all encompassing that it offends Malaysians who take their elections seriously. Now that it’s passed, virtually all criticism of the BN government by the opposition, or by non-partisan NGOs attempting to refocus the voters’ attention on serious issues can be interpreted as an offence. How then will the opposition conduct its campaign if it cannot expose the government’s scandals and wrong-doings and criticise its policies and programmes? Can we still talk about how the government bailed out its cronies with funds which actually belong to the rakyat? What if we unearth evidence of Maika-Talikom proportions? Or of the UEM-Renong hanky-panky? There is also much statistical evidence of widening disparities between the rich and poor in Malaysia within all the communities: what if the fact is made an electoral issue?
Or will criticism of Mahathir’s September 2001 pronouncement of Malaysia as an Islamic state be deemed an electoral offence? What if Suqiu reminds the voters of how Mahathir unfairly likenend them to terrorists? Will opposition to the government’s Vision School programme and criticism of its lag in permitting the re-location of Chinese primary schools from the city centres to the suburbs or other locales be construed as contravening the law? And what if UMNO leaders are criticised for deviating from Islamic injunctions of pursuing truth, justice and equity?
In raising these issues, some people somewhere in Malaysia will surely experience “ill-will, discontent or hostility”. Who then decides if the law has been broken ? Obviously, some party loyalist will file the police report. The Police will then investigate the alleged wrong-doing and the Attorney General’s Chambers will then decide whether the matter should go to Court or not. Theoretically, one could see as many BN as well as opposition (and NGO) personalities being hauled up. Realistically, however, it is most likely that those cases that do go to court will surely come from only one side. We did say, after all, that the electoral process is the last remaining democratic institution. No doubt this law is meant to further muzzle the opposition.
Other Offences
Necessarily some sections of the Election Offences Act have also been amended so as to be in tandem with amendments to the Election Act. For instance, henceforth, a petitioner cannot make a claim for a declaration that any candidate was duly elected and ought to have been returned. A new Section 35A stipulates that the trial of every election petition shall be completed not later than six months after the petition has been presented. Finally, a petitioner can no longer ask the court to declare that an aggrieved candidate “was duly elected and ought to have been returned.”
Section 3 has also been amended so that it will be an offence to obstruct or prevent a voter who is entitled to vote from voting at an election. Anyone who votes at more than one polling station whether in the same or different constituency also commits an offence. The maximum punishment is five years jail and/or RM10,000 fine; and a person so convicted shall vacate his seat (if any) and be barred from voting or contesting for five years.
Another amendment increases the penalties for corrupt practices (section 5) “to ensure that the punishment is commensurate with the offence”. The maximum term of imprisonment which, depending on the offence used to range from six to 12 months, has been increased to one to two years, depending on the offence, and the maximum fine ranging from RM500-RM1,000 has been increased to RM2,000-RM5,000.
Involving the Rakyat
Instead of indulging in the politics of exclusion and denial, the BN government should endeavour to make politics accessible to all. As suggested above, the rakyat could also be recruited to assist the SPR as “ghost-busters”. Without even amending any laws, the government should direct the SPR. (which it controls in reality) to look into issues such as:
* rectifying the mal-apportionment of the constituencies: some urban constituencies are more than four times bigger than the rural ones (in terms of population size), thereby undermining the principle of one man one vote;
* providing fair access to the mass media and curbing lies and misinformation in the media;
* insisting on a public declaration of electoral finances by all candidates;
* providing for longer campaign periods so that the people can be informed of the issues; and
* allowing the holding of open-air rallies in addition to ceramahs.
It will be a long wait before the BN delivers on such reforms. Ultimately, ordinary Malaysians like us must wake up to push for these reforms ourselves. Otherwise, we might find ourselves either registered as phantom voters or being ruled ‘irrelevant’ vis-à-vis the electoral process. We must prevent this last remaining democratic institution - warts and all - from falling into the hands of the Executive. Aliran. (http://www.aliran.com/oldsite/monthly/2002/3c.html)