Cheating in Postal Votes

holeng.dapsarawak.
Picture shows 13 ballot papers rejected because of duplicity

Picture shows Stephen Lu and David Wong manually helping check for duplicity in postal votes for police and army

Picture shows My wife/election agent and a SUPP agent checking the envelopes for duplicate voters in the police and arm forces. The SUPP agent left after 30 minutes, with Robert Lau’s son

Picture shows my wife/election agent checking the envelopes from one of the 10 streams for duplicate voters in the police and arm forces

Cheating in Postal Votes

Today, at the Resident’s Office, the Election Commission (EC) officers in Sibu issued postal votes to the police and army personnel, and in the course of supervising the issuance, we caught 13 postal voters who were entitled to vote twice, for their names were registered twice on the electoral roll. They were to be given 2 ballot papers each. But the story did not end here.

We asked the EC officers to verify the duplicated voters by a computer. It had none.

All the ballot papers for more than 2600 postal voters in the police and army were contained in the envelopes and placed on the table. My election agent and workers had to use naked eyes to pick up the duplicity!

Credit to the EC workers in Sibu, they were very patient watching us do the checking, but is that the way to run an election?

From the morning till about 4p.m., my workers forgot their lunches and ploughed through the piles and piles of envelopes, looking for duplicated voters.

My workers were not provided with lunch by the EC.

The work to check for duplicity was supposed to be done by the EC as we were not supposed to even touch those envelopes. But we were told to do it. The EC officers just watched.

In the course of doing so, Robert Lau’s son and his agent also came to the Resident’s Office. The agent checked and handled the envelopes also. After about 30 minutes they left. The PKR candidate Lim Chin Chuang also came. He took a look, and left.

They all knew that with DAP going through the chores, things must be in good hands.

We found 13 duplicate voters. But we thought that a computer check would have been faster and better.

Just when we had done all that we could with our eyes, the EC HQ in Kuching faxed a list to the Returning Officer showing that in Sibu Parliamentary constituency, there were 10 duplicate voters.

Why could not the EC expugn these duplicate voters? Why had the EC to wait until they were caught with their pants down? Why could our naked eyes pick 13 yet the EC’s computer could only 10?

The EC had to bluff even in the last minute, despite having been caught red handed.

All the 13 envelopes containing duplicate voters were rejected. Of course, they could still vote with the remaining ballot.

Such is the type of democracy in our country. Some are entitled to vote twice. The EC is caught sleeping, and even at the point where they were caught red handed, they were cheating us to say that the list was only 10.

During the ceramah in the evening, I checked the list of postal voters generated by our own computer. There were more duplicate voters than 13.

As my workers worked through the piles and piles of envelopes, the police officer in charge of the postal voting became very agitated. He accused me of delaying the process. He told me that his boss had already instructed the police to vote at 1:00 p.m. till 5 p.m. I asked him whether they must vote during those hours despite the fact that we had caught irregularity in the electoral roll. He said “yes”, without blinking an eye.

I would never bulge to this sort of cheating in the electoral roll. The police should not endorse, knowing fully well that we had caught the duplicate voters both in the police force and the army.

Instead of helping to ensure a cleaner voting system, the police inspector was visibly upset. He accused me that it was because of what we were doing that the police could not vote today.

So what? Just because you are the police? Why the rush? You guys can vote until 5p.m. on 8th March, 2008. Why do you have to rush?

The Major from the army camp also insisted to bring home the postal votes to his camps today. But after my explanation, he agreed that it could be postponed. He was clearly a nicer man than the police officer in charge.

To set the record straight, the police would vote on 4th March and the arm forces personnel would vote on 6th March, said the EC. So, why the rush?

Beware! There are cheats in the electoral rolls for postal voting. Some voters registered twice under slightly different names. Registering their names using “Ak” and also “Anak”, or “B” and “Bin” makes them him entitled to 2 votes. Using the police number or Tenetra number to register, then also using their IC to register will also entitle them to 2 votes.

Who has allowed this? The EC.

1/3/2008