Amend election laws to ensure that candidates who use May 13 threats during elections should be automatically disqualified


Media comment
by Lim Kit Siang 

(Ipoh, Saturday): DAP has long called for an overhaul of the election laws to ensure that Malaysia has an electoral system which is fair, free and clean but all these years our proposals for radical changes to the election laws have fallen on deaf ears.

Now, government leaders from the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad downwards are talking about changes to election laws just because of their defeat in the Lunas by-election, as for instance, the proposal that candidates who use race and religion to woo votes during elections should be automatically disqualified.

DAP supports proposals to amend election laws to check  electoral abuses, whether  the exploitation of race and religion in elections - as happened in the last general election when Barisan Nasional campaigners  resorted to the politics of fear and falsehoods frightening voters with the lies that a vote for DAP would be a vote for an Islamic state where the Chinese would not be able to eat pork, their temples and Chinese schools closed and their culture and way of life threatened - or the politics of money, blackmail and intimidation.

The election laws should in particular be amended to provide that candidates whose election campaign use May 13 threats  of racial riots and violence if voters support the candidates of another party should be automatically disqualified.

The scandal of phantom voters, as highlighted by some 20 buses of phantom voters from outside Lunas who were transported to the constituency from various states in the country on by-election polling day, is the greatest blemish to the electoral system and why it could not claim to be free, fair and clean.

The cleaning up of the electoral roll to remove every phantom voter in every constituency, i.e. a voter who neither reside or work in the constituency but had been registered as a  voter to perpetrate the fraud of phantom voting, should be the top priority of the Election Commission in the next twelve months.
 

(2/12/2000)


*Lim Kit Siang - DAP National Chairman