Charles Santiago, the MP for Klang, has tweeted about the parliamentary select committee: “Membership on PSC 4 electoral reform: 5BN, 3PR, 1 ind – X acceptable, favors BN. Equal rep bet PR n BN, no ind; Co-chair, 1 from PR n BN.”
He added: “@najibrazak needs to guarantee no PRU 13 b4 PSC electoral reforms recommendations are implemented. o/wise PSC smokescreen n PR exercise”
The committee will be headed by a minister. With five BN reps plus a likely pro-BN ‘independent’ against three opposition reps, how fair is the parliamentary select committee going to be? Not off to a good start.
“The chair has control of the final report. But if you have a PR chair it has to be negotiated,” said Charles, when contacted.
The setting up of the select committee, bound to be met with scepticism, comes not a moment too soon. Today, Malaysiakini reported that four ex-military men alleged they were ordered to tick off postal ballots meant for service personnel and their wives. And it is interesting to see one of them saying they were just following orders and were not concerned about politics:”Even after retirement, we didn’t care so much about politics. But when Bersih came about, we started to realise that what we did was not right.”
So Bersih has had a big impact. All the hanky panky over the years is slowly being revealed. Let’s hope more whistle-blowers step forward.
How badly we need electoral reforms. But questions are already being raised about the composition of the select committee.
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Hi Anil, In my opinion, the concept is all wrong. Surely, common sense dictates that a Committee tasked to look into Electoral Reform has to be totally Independent & politically neutral. How can it be filled by political parties ? Actually, I’m not even convinced that we should start with “Electoral Reform” … I think we should be lookng into Electoral Fraud first and foremost. The day-to-day revelations of cloned voters, duplicate voters, non-citizen voters who turn into voters in 4 hours, phantom voters, etc. Surely, these can be investigated & prosecuted under existing laws. Investigation, followed by prosecution and… Read more »
Bersih is proposing something like that. Two reports covering short-term and long-term reforms.
See here:
http://bersih.org/?p=4489
In Sarawak, there are 2267 voters with age beyond 100 years old. 9323 voters beyond the age of 90 years old. 36120 voters beyond the age of 80 years old. 102328 voters beyond the age of 70 years old. 229313 voters beyond the age of 60 years old. The total voters in Sarawak is 941154. Yet it can has polling rate beyond 90%, the old folks in Sarawak must be very healthy and active.
Tell me how many of PKR’s candidates have enough election workers and counting agents to ensure that the counting processes are under their watch!
If you want to talk about election reform, make sure that all the opposition parties only field candidates with sufficient number of election workers and counting agents. Otherwise EC can announce any result it want as what happened in Sarawak where polling rate can achieve beyond 90% when those above 70 years old is more than 10% of the total voters. If you has no means to stop election fraud, there is no point talking about election reform.
If you allow BN to cheat, why complaining?
Do we really want to believe that overnight, the UMNO (guys) have transformed into fair minded politicians?…dream on, wait for all the rivers in Malaysia flow upstream!
The cheap tactic used by these jerks were to be seen as fair and rakyat caring… All I can say, “How many times must a man be screwed and regularly coned before he becomes wiser and come to his senses”.
With modern technology, Bersih and the PR can’t even consolidate the electoral database to ensure that one voter can only has one vote, then they should stop complaining about election fraud. If they can allow BN to cheat but don’t know how to stop it, the election will no longer has any meaning! What is the point of having select committee on election reform?