(Petaling Jaya, Friday):
The
Elections Commission is barking up the wrong tree with the new batch of
Elections Act amendments, focussing on unimportant and even irrelevant issues
while ignoring important questions casting a dark shadow on its ability to carry
out its constitutional mandate to
conduct free, fair and clean elections as the bedrock of a functioning and
legitimate parliamentary democracy.
The
Elections Act (Amendment) Bill which had been presented to Parliament quadruples
the election deposit of a candidates from the present RM5,000 to
a maximum amount of RM20,000, which is completely irrelevant to the
cancer of the Malaysian electoral process - the politics of money.
The
electoral law to restrict the politics of money in the form of a legal limit to
a maximum of election expenditure of RM30,000 for a state assembly candidate and
RM50,000 for a parliamentary candidate is broken many times in a single day of
election campaigning by a Barisan
Nasional candidate - sometimes broken by the hour - and this is
further compounded by even greater election expenditures in the name of the
Barisan Nasional and its component parties.
Instead
of quadrupling the election deposit of candidates, discouraging free electoral
contest and turning elections into a contest of money, the Election Commission
should have introduced amendments to effectively enforce the legal limits on
election expenditures for candidates so that this provision will cease to be the
biggest joke on the statute books
for its most frequent breach.
The
Elections Act should also be amended to limit the election expenditures
permitted to political parties in each constituency and for the whole country in
a general election. No political party or coalition, for instance, should be allowed
in its name to exceed the RM50,000
permissible to be spent by its
parliamentary candidate for each constituency.
This will place a national limit to the election expenditures which a
political party or coalition could spend for the whole country in a general
election.
On
the basis of legal ceiling of RM50,000 for each of the 193 parliamentary
constituencies, this will work out to maximum ceiling of RM9.65 million that could be spent by a political party or
coalition nationwide for 193 parliamentary constituencies in any general
election - which is a far cry from
the hundreds of millions of ringgit if not billions spent by the Barisan
Nasional for each general election.
The
Elections Amendment Bill proposal to
raise the compensation payable
by a complainant who lodges an objection without reasonable cause or good faith over
the insertion of voter’s name on the
electoral roll from RM200 to RM1,000
is most ridiculous and another abuse
of the parliamentary process - in utter disregard of the fact that one of the
biggest blots of the electoral process is the lack of a reliable and credible
electoral roll with the endless complaints about phantom voters, electors who
had voted for several previous general elections suddenly disappearing from the
roll as in Ketari in Pahang in the
upcoming by-election and the absence of a mechanism to speedily register or
reinstate eligible voters so that they could exercise their constitutional right
to vote.
The
five-fold increase of RM200 to
RM1,000 as “compensation” for a baseless complaint is uncalled for, as
Malaysians should be encouraged to be public-spirited to help the Election
Commission to clean up the electoral roll of phantom and unqualified voters in a
particular constituency rather than penalised for helping to verify to ensure a
clean electoral roll.
Surely,
it does not cost the Election Commission or any voter RM1,000 just to verify
that a voter registration is correct and proper? By the same logic, is the
Election Commission going to give a reward of up to RM1,000 for every objection
to the insertion of a name on the electoral which is sustained and proved to be
true?
The provision
to make an electoral roll which has been certified or re-certified to be
“deemed to be final and binding and shall not be questioned or appealed
against in, or reviewed, quashed or
set aside by, any court” is most undemocratic and retrogressive, as it is
designed to remove an important check and balance against a faulty
or dishonest electoral roll.
All
in all, the amendments proposed to the Elections Act 1958 are most retrogressive
measures as they are not designed to make the Malaysian electoral process free,
fair and clean but to forestall effective checks and balances to achieve this
objective.
(22/3/2002)