The Sarawak Pakatan Leadership Council is taking shape. It is constituted with five members each from DAP, PKR, Pas and Snap, according to a tweet by Kit Siang.
Jul 192010
Jun 032010
Elections are important but they should be seen in the context of a much larger struggle for reforms and change played out over decades. This is something I wrote before the Sibu by-election, but it still holds true any time.
May 262010
The Sibu churches who received grants from the federal government during the recent by-election plan have missed the chance to take a public stand against vote-buying. They intend to keep the money, their pastors offering a host of reasons, some of them maybe legitimate: it’s public money; they had applied for the money earlier; they went through proper procedures; what can they do if the money is given during the campaign; there were no conditions attached; they are tax-paying citizens as well.
May 242010
UPDATED: Pakatan polling agents were unable to witness the casting of ballots by over a thousand postal voters who were said to be located outside the Sibu police headquarters and two main army camps. That’s the assertion made by an experienced Pas polling agent familiar with the process, which revealed glaring weaknesses and loop-holes in the Sibu by-election. Back at Wisma Sanyan, the main coordinating centre for postal ballots, the agents for the Sibu by-election exercised unprecedented scrutiny over the counting and verification of the ballots. As the agents spotted more and more discrepancies in the postal ballots, the pile of spoilt and rejected ballots grew higher and higher. (The agents had been thoroughly briefed on what to look out for.)
May 192010
In Sibu, the DAP team had to struggle long and hard for the postal votes when they were being tallied. It’s time we take a long hard look at postal votes during elections. Even in other countries, postal voting has been open to electoral abuse. In Birmingham, a judge found rogue Labour activists and candidates tampered with forms. In the Malaysian context, postal voting certainly doesn’t inspire public confidence in the electoral process.