This looming election is getting interesting by the minute, it amazes me the tricks that these politicians are pulling out of their sleeves. What’s more amazing is the Malaysian people’s utter and complete trust in their fiasco. Most people are more interested in propaganda than policies.
I would like to discuss the topic of Undi Hantu and Crocodile tears hand in hand, because this both comes down to the same issue of system weakness and human error, and to the consequences of our actions.
Undi Hantu
A supposedly “non political page” on Facebook posted the image below and poses questions along the lines of what a co-incident that we have so many voters by similar name, in similar area, and born in the similar years. Real or ghost voters?
In my view it suggest biasness of the admin, however, the thing that worries me is the ill-intention to hamper their readers trust toward the Malaysian SPR system, if they have not been following political updates. If this was presented in a political forum, I'd view it differently.
However, I acknowledge that not everybody understands the consequences of their actions.
I’m somewhat patriotic especially when it comes to issues like our democratic system, national security issues and our independence; I feel obliged to research and take some initiative to give you some benefit of the doubt.
I believe that a rational voter must be able to separate to things:
- The Real issue of Malaysia Electoral System
THE PAKATAN RAKYAT's CAMPAIGN
Here is the table for discussions in the context of “the PR campaign”:
At outset, I considered at how worrying this is however I was half-expecting this to be raised again by the PR because oppositions are sometime sore losers.
Here are some things you can consider when looking at the above table…..
1. The old Malay customs, where names are similar and common.
Thankfully, in 20 years time, we may not have this problem as the Malay names are getting more and more complicated, that I sometimes need to check if my daughter’s name “sofiah” was spelled with double F or double Y “soffiyah” vs “sofiyyah”.
The uniqueness of the modern name hopefully resolved PR paranoia.
2. The question of how many Fatimah can there be? Well the range of years is from 1937 to 1956, so I think that is a moot point, but the display is rather cunning.
What more is when you accompany this table with a poster published on the Rafizi Ramli’s page;
As you can see here En. Rafizi claims that 900 people is by the same name and was born on the same day in the same village.
However, given that we have advantage of the table above, we know this is a lie because the datas of birth and locality varies.
This simple irresponsible gesture by Pakatan Rakyat managed to undo their image and their hard campaign for telus, bersih and keadilan. Simply at the snapshot of time, Pakatan Rakyat managed to lie to more than 3000 people.
My previous issues with Pakatan Rakyat were (and still is) their weak and poorly planned policies, but in light of this, it is safe to say they are no different than any politician that one would expect.
3. The claim that SPR will not respond and act on this, despite complains.
I’m sure you have heard that recently, En. Rafizi Ramli got SPR to check on Wan Muhammad Azri Wan Deris (allegedly to be papagomo) as pengundi hantu . Apparently, Wan Muhammad Azri was an ex officer who should have his officer IC revoked in SPR records. He also has an ordinary IC as a registered voter. Yes, SPR did help with the case, and helped them resolved the issue.
If SPR helped Pakatan Rakyat with that, then why when faced with the listing above, Pakatan Rakayat are saying SPR will not do much? Sympathy votes? Like they say nak seribu daya…….
4. Finally, a little bit of due diligence, let us look at the records and year “Fatimah Binti Ismail” was born. Was that not during when BN was ruling Kelantan?
And yet, despite this “alleged” pengundi hantu(s) PAS can still win against BN?
5. The most illogical thing of this whole allegation is that PR and their supporters is willing to give credit to the government for being smart enough to issue two birth records, IC and to tamper with the system and yet people believe that the government is dumb enough not to change the birth date, or the name of the individual, or to vary the location a little bit?
SPR system, like all system in the world, is not 100% perfect. There are many weakness identified within the system. The question is what we are doing about it.
THE REAL ISSUE (and how does this impact us Rakyat?)
For starter you might need to get to know MERAP’s effort.
The Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (MERAP) is a research initiative undertaken by Dr. Ong Kian Ming, a lecturer and political analyst at UCSI University, to identify problems in the electoral roll and to find ways to correct these problems.
MERAP is supposedly independent but it is worth
nothing the following:
“Ong is the project director of Malaysian Electoral
Roll Analysis Project (Merap), which has been providing statistics and evidence
on electoral irregularities to back the demands of the electoral reform
coalition, Bersih”
What MERAP is trying to do is to scrutinize the Electoral database. This task is complex and time consuming on both part.
Personally, I sense a
little bit of biased on MERAP but nonetheless, I’m grateful for MERAP
because it is much more important for us the Rakyat to know we have taken
action to resolving this system issues.
Why I think there is a biased in MERAP are as follows:
Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof responded to Merap the number of doubtful voters in the current
roll was 42,051 which is in ratio is marginal error, and claims that number of discrepencies (3m) pulled by MERAP must have more backing to it.
For you and me, we need to be rational in assessing this , who is telling us the truth?
MERAP methodology of pulling and reconciling records are based on what they considered were more
than co-incidental, what is considered at risk by the opposition team, based on duplicates of OLD ic number and foreign born.
There many reports and response between this two party. There are openess and constant communication. I view this as a positive thing.
However, there is a lack of acceptance and reluctance to accept explanation by MERAP. This is actually quite a negative thing, as this waste time and looking for flaws in areas that can be explained. This I cannot understand.
For example, some of the selection of "dubious voters" were explained but MERAP keep raising suspicions to issues like
lack of house number in rural and remote areas, the common name (e.g. Fatimah Ismail) and other administration errors.
For me, administrations errors must be accepted and fixed as system weakness, and then move on.
I personally think, in life, you can be suspicious of everything and anything (like one person told me he is convinced that the government hospital will give him medication to kill him slowly instead of for his benefit becuase they are looking to reduce support costs!??!) but something are just the way they are and you just have to overcome your unfounded suspicion.
It is true that some remote villages, people do not have house number, I don't know why this is difficult to believe. Actually, during my time working in Ireland, I was surprised at the lack of house numbers especially in Northern Ireland area. All correspondance are address by name of the person and street and not to mentioned the repetiotion of name like John, David, Sean with the same family name and sometimes the dad and the son have the exact same name. If it happen in Europe, why is it difficult for us to accept the same in Malaysia.
One interesting example is that MERAP have raised question
on "foreign born" are registered as voters. For me personally,
this is illogical in two stages, one is the reality and second the discrimination.
The reality is foreign born can be Malaysian child born abroad or immigrant have subsequently earned citizenship. My family are from multi-racial background and not everbody is married to a local. Over time, foreign nationals earned their citizenship rights. Also for people who lives abroad and have children born outside of Malaysia but are citizen of Malaysia also earns the rights to be nationals.
The descrimination is that MERAP keeps questioning the number of foreign born and their rights to vote. If we are going to discriminate individuals who were previously foreign nationals of Bangladeshi or Indonesioan, then shouldn't we discriminate all inclusively for all previous foreign nationals, back then was mostly from China and India?
I believe that we Malaysian need to learn to accept the fact that we will continue to
have new foreign born nationals. Under the law, we cannot discriminate the voting rights,
it’s open to all Malaysian, and as long as they have a valid IC and they are
nationals, they should be able to vote.
If there are issues on uncontrolled immigration, then it's out of context of MERAP or EC. Mixing these issues together has does not bring any benefit to this project.
MERAP puts too much emphasis on
the errors documented in the old IC which was administration error made under a manual
systems (yes, we didn't always have computer systems) and if you factor that in with illiterate voters who cannot take the responsibility to check the accuracy of
their documents, you can understand how exposed the old methods to error.
What I would’ve expected for MERAP is to put more emphasis
to consider that in 1990s Malaysia have introduce a new registration system
which is Mykad and consider that MYkad is used to verify voters on election day. Old IC number are irrelevant for the voting perspective.
So, I disagree with MERAP inclusion of discrepancies of old IC number to their count.
You may argue that it all look too dubious! How can you possibly say it is not.
The benefit of doub lies in the below interesting examples.
Anybody would have easily
concluded the following as phantom voters but upon investigations, it turned out to be that there were pure administration made in
locality or individual name itself and found them to be 4
genuine voters with two documenting errors.
Even on a computer system, when you are pulling records all day, you are prone to typo, pulling the incorrect records match against an incorrect data.
Following
that, MERAP while reporting a huge number of discrepancies found within the electoral system
caveat their research, as said by the man himself,
“I’m not
saying that all the flaws I’m showing are necessarily phantom voters but EC to
explain these discrepancies,” "I
have never said that all these 3.1 million potential non-resident voters are
dubious voters" said Ong.
My question is why should we be so quick to judge?
Is there malicious intent? Should we feel confident with our system for the looming election?
That is entirely up to you to answer.
It really depends on how much exposure you have with dealing with large data and exposure with systems and exposure with being outside of Malaysia's system, or how much you are willing to read and investigate and your methods of concluding.
For me, I’m used to dealing with large volume of transaction data, I understand systems issues and margin for errors. The aim has always been true and fair view but continuously working on process improvement.
Is that acceptable under electoral system, well, I think yes and no. On individual basis, margin of error is frustrating and if it issue for somebody's voting rights then yes it matters. In this case, i believe the responsibility is of the voters not EC.
However, collectively, the margin of error can be measured and risk assessed. A small error will not add advantage or disadvantage to either party, then I conclude with confidence to rely on our
electoral intergity.
Margin of Error
For example issue of foreign born, MERAP quotes "A total of 171,023 out of 13 million eligible voters" that is 1% of population all inclusive.
Let me put in perspective, my two daughters are foreign born, so is the children of many of my friends and families. That is also similar to many of Pakatan Rakyat voters who lives abroad. In my own family example, a family of 4, that 50% Malaysian born, 50% foreign born.
The issue is one two level, the question how realistic is the number and high concentration.
With regards to higher concentration in some state and not in others was explained by EC.
Selangor is one of the most populous state in Malaysia and with the
highest rate of employment, Selangor has attracted a large number of residents
from other states.
My frustration with MERAP is the are keen to provide statistics to query what they think is abnormal trend and yet they will not accept the statistic to explain demographics. I don't understand why, do you?
On a personal level, I know many friends and family who migrated back in the last year or so, due to government initiative to bring talents back hom and work in the area. Many would have foreign born child, some can be old enough to vote.
Hence, from my perspective, 1% of total population is foreign born isn't alarming. In my opinion, MERAP spend way too much time exploring Selangor area due to slight bias for Pakatan Rakyat.
For me, if there are basis or proof for malicious intent, that's granted.
However, just becuase of paranoia or influenced by personal support for political gain, then the reports are biased and unfounded. If you cannot understand the concept, then you may refer to "fitnah" as it is commonly used.
After reading tons of MERAP reports, the opposition media and newspapers and the EC feedbacks, I believe that most of this errors are largely attributed to human and system error.
However, I noticed also there are also issues with cross departmental communications, the consistency of action taken to rectify issues and finally the lack of responsibility assumed by us the voters. This are system weakness that EC must work to resolve.
Malicious intent is quite a serious allegation and create doubts for the intergrity of our democratic system. I believe, if we are responsible, we cannot make that allegation purely based on our paranoia, instead we need proof.
MERAP still have a lot of work to do and EC is working hard to bridge the gaps in their reports, where possible rectifying the issues.
In the mean time, we have live with the fact that our system, like all systems in the world are not perfect.
I’m a strong believer in our democratic system.
In fact, I suspects even the opposition team is a believer in our systems because in a strange contradiction to their protest, Pakatan Rakyat is heavily campaigning for their supporter to “jom undi” and requesting their supporters that live abroad to come home to vote.
If Pakatan Rakyat has no faith in Malaysia democratic system, then campaign is pointless, until this issue is resolved. I would’ve expected them to pull all stops until this is resolved and there is no point for election this coming May.
Also, miraculously, despite all of PR and BERSIH allegations on the “mishandled electoral system” somehow PAS, DAP and Keadilan did win 4 states (out of 11). Think, that is almost equal majority! How did they achieve this if Malaysia is not democratic?
What happen if Pakatan Rakyat wins the elections? Will MERAP continue their effort? What happen if they lose, will we ever hear the end of it?
Is the political landscape in Malaysia so childish that we the supporters are willing to be fed lies or will we grow up and conclude indepandently?
In all allegations (from corruptions to sex scandal), it is important for us to understand at what magnitude is the exaggerations. It must be trigger point for our researchs. If you choose to entirely rely on feeds, then you risk prejudice. It is difficult thing to do, but I think we must work hard to outgrow our double moral behavious and our culture for "Fitnah or Allegations" as they have same important consequences, on both side.
Well, that was some flavor behind the "UNDI HANTU" and I hope you are now encouraged to research this more without bias as this is more than just for political gain of BN or PR. Malaysia is our country and we need to be proud of our democratic system. It’s integrity is far more important than our personal preferance of parties.
For me, what I learned while exploring this issue is that never under estimate the power of exaggerations and to take more responsiblty as citizen.
Moaning and complaining on facebook really doesn’t solve our problems, hence I’ve also emailed the listing above to SPR as a concerned citizen.
Crocodile Tears
My friend mentioned to me this morning, those folks are crying wolf! The DAP election issues fiasco is beyond embarrassing. Man, I agree!
Here is the campaign as I see it…
“DAP has been facing the heat it to appear to be more racially-inclusive, and PAS is under preassure to appear to be more in friendship with DAP after their fall-out during the failed ‘Barisan Alternative’ fiasco”
It is my opinion, perhaps DAP can clarify, that their campaign is simply a manipulation of ethnic issues and camouflage of the bigger disagreement at hand?
The amount of distribution of photos of these two holding each other’s flag and posing together is quite funny. For me this is nothing more than a desperate act to show voters the “friendship” and I believe it is purely to helping voters to forget that the two parties fundamentally have a big hurdle that they need to address, one voting for liberalism and the other for Islamic nation with hudud law.
Here is what I gather from reading all the various sources, mostly DAP sources.....
The DAP election issues was raised last December. To date, that is over 4 months ago and DAP (a party who has been persuading voters of their good ability in administration) has failed to look into resolving this election issues?
My impression of DAP is that they are a party that stocks with talents and lawyers hence I cannot understand why they would struggle to resolve their election issues. Can you?
While the Societies Act section may precludes the courts from exercising jurisdiction in matters but the fact that Malaysian Today wrote quite extensively on the 17th of February 2013 criticizing Datuk Hishamuddin for not doing his homework about his comment on this “de-registration” issue. The newspaper argued and outlining why and how this de-registration cannot happen, in rather lengthy and quite technical details, is enough to show this party’s ability to resolve this technical issues.
There is this notion about Datuk Najib panic at the idea of DAP using PAS’s symbols, hence influenced RoS.
I should let you know that UMNO faced deregistration in 1987.
If Datuk Najib have such a strong influence on RoS’s decision regarding DAP registration and logo issue, then why didn’t Tun. M use the same influenced the issue back in 1987?
The UMNO de-registration was messy and havoc but given that UMNO was under a strong leadership, this was addressed quickly and quite smartly. UMNO was not too proud to resolve by not re-instating, instead to re-register under a new party name.
To give you some of flavour of the issues back then, here’s a quotation....
"'It is a very hard decision to declare UMNO unlawful,' said Justice Datuk Harun Hashim in his February 4 judgement. 'But the law was made by our Parliament and certainly UMNO was aware [of the Societies Act] because they were in the majority [in Parliament] at all times [when the law was made].”
Yup! It’s UMNO’s own fault and they had to face the consequences. Guys, the fact of the matter is, nobody is above the law, even if the opposition would like to sell you that idea.
Yes, our systems are not perfect and require constant review and updates. Yes, occasionally we see glitch and isolated cases but realistically is there such thing as a perfect system? It is no excuse but it happen and that is why we continuously embrace process improvements. Even under PR, there will be glitch in the system, that’s why DAP is in the situation in the first place, isn’t it?
What I thought was interesting in this DAP fiasco, this issue was raised last December .
Under normal circumstances, this issue should be resolved and not let it dragged on, because there is so much at stake. As my friend discussed this topic with me, he interestingly mentioned that “ if this was a corporation organisation, somebody will be fired. It is just not acceptable!!”
I couldn’t agree more! Don’t you?
I cannot help to think in the context of the "buku jingga" what Pakatan Rakyat will do in the first 100 days in office. I feel that this DAP issue unable to resolve their election issues within 4 months, but somehow PR seems to have ambitious reformation plan just over 3 months? Doesn't that just boggled your mind?
Well, if every action has its consequences, then it is my opinion that the price for crying wolf, to gain sympathy vote, to take advantage of the situation to demonstrate the close allies relationship will actually be very costly, more than any party can realise it.
My question for DAP is, despite all the expertise and the legal ability, why do DAP take their election issues lightly?
If DAP cannot manage their election issues, what is their ability to manage the country?
If DAP is willing to play political game by putting their party at risk, on what basis should we rakyat trust you to look after our affairs.
PAS so proudly announced that “roket dah sampai ke bulan”.
In my opinion, Rocket’s ability has always superseded bulan, and for an observer like me, that slogan really translated as “Roket patah balik ke-bulan” because somehow, for me, DAP who I view is the strongest opposition even within their own allies managed to lower their standard.
Thank you.
~fida.i~
