Pro and con arguments to strung-out polls

When first mooted early this year, the arguments against simultaneous parliamentary and state polls in the Pakatan Rakyat-controlled states were tentative at best.

To be sure, in the pros and cons ledger the arguments had more weight on the former side, but in the debit column the prospects were riddled with an ambiguity politicians are notably chary about.

The strongest argument of proponents of delay is that Pakatan administrations, especially in Penang and Selangor, would thereby give themselves a longer timeframe to implement their programmes.

A longer tenancy would reinforce Pakatan claims to better-than-BN governance.

Furthermore, proponents held that Pakatan representatives in Penang and Selangor were elected to a five-year term whose span must be run through to give the electorate enough time to evaluate the new governors.

Voters make their choice not on sudden drifts of emotion but on felt experience and analysis.

A longer tenancy by administrations that are corruption-wary, frugal, solicitous of the poor and the striving, and leery of big-ticket expense items, would convey the notion more effectively to voters that Pakatan governance is good for the common folk.

Therefore, more time for bent-on-improvement Pakatan would render voters more certain in electing to re-endorse politicians who the last time around they may have selected merely from wanting to give new brooms a chance to show their stuff.

The common thread in arguments for delayed state polls was that an improved standard of governance can only get better with time and that, in turn, favours rational-choice by voters.

Contra arguments

The principal argument on the debit side of the ledger was that delayed state polls would mean Pakatan would come up against a heightened effort by the BN towards retaking lost territory.

BN are never more formidable than when focused and concentrated which delayed polls in a couple of states would enable them to be.

Combined with their amorality with regard to exploiting institutions of state, such as the police force, military and state-owned media, to serve their campaign needs, the BN machinery would become well-nigh hard to beat.

Moreover - this reason did not surface when the delayed state polls match-up of pro and contra arguments took place - should Pakatan run BN close in parliament and in state assembles in other parts of the country, voters might be tempted to ‘give face' to a beleaguered BN in Penang and Selangor.

This has happened in Sabah and Sarawak in the years before polling for parliamentary elections became a one-day affair with the country's 7th general election in 1986.

Before 1986, Sarawakian and Sabahan voters, on the second day of their polling, tended to give the opposition more seats in the Parliament when the announced results at the end of the first - and only - day's polling on the Peninsula issued in heavy defeat to the opposition.

Furthermore, delayed polls means voters are called upon to make more trips in exercise of their rights; voters who are out-of-towners are required to make arrangements to come back to vote - not really a smart thing to make them do, say, in Kelantan, though that is not a Pakatan-controlled state that is said to be mulling delayed state polls.

In short, delayed polls are a bother to all sides of the political divide.

EC wants to consult Pakatan states

A general election is a concentrated period of distemper in the body politic. It requires simultaneousness in its mandated processes to get the whole thing over and done with.

A hopscotch quality to the staging process will issue in a drawn-out affair in preference to a delineated one.

In recent days, however, the threat by Pakatan governments in Penang and Selangor to opt for delayed polls has given them leverage on a matter that has been the unfair prerogative of the BN supremo - when the general election will be called.

The Election Commission wants to consult with governments in the Pakatan-controlled states on the need to have parliamentary and state elections simultaneously.

But both Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng in Penang and Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim in Selangor have indicated that they are not inclined to be acquiescent to the BN supremo's timing and the EC's determination on the length of the campaign period.

By intimating they are for delayed state polls in their domains, both Lim and Khalid are putting pressure on the prime minister and the EC chair to have the general election only after the electoral rolls have been cleansed and other structural inequities, like a compressed campaign period and barred access to state-owned media by the opposition, are eased.

Najib plays fast and loose

PM Najib Razak appears to want to go to the polls sooner rather than later, regardless of whether the select parliamentary committee on polls reform has completed its work.

Najib is content to play fast and loose on the issue of reform to country's more draconian laws. Latest examples in Parliament of his idea of reform to the ISA and the various laws governing what is called ‘symbolic speech' (demonstrations) suggest that he is not averse to calling a spade a spoon and a bludgeon a hammer.

Faced with such dissimulations, Pakatan governments in Penang and Selangor must extract whatever leverage they can from the PM's desire to hold early and simultaneous polls and a play-along EC's wish to be acquiescent to the powers-that-be and to economise on the costs of staging the 13th general election.

Thus the specter of delayed state polls can be leveraged to lessen the inherent disadvantages faced by the opposition in the way a general election plays out in the country.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.