Hello EC, do listen to the rakyat!

By conveniently choosing to ignore the shenanigans that are still going on, it is thumbing its nose at the rakyat.

COMMENT

The Election Commission (EC) is at it again. Despite citizens’ calls for free and fair elections via the Bersih movement, PAS has discovered more irregularities in the voter rolls.

In the parliamentary seat of Pandan in Selangor, currently held by MCA’s Ong Tee Keat, phantom voters have been “residing” in houses in Lorong Kemajuan 1, 2 and 3 of Kampung Pandan.

Several examples are: No 5 has 43 phantom voters; No 29 has 13; No 31 has 11; No 33 has 18; and No 39 has four.

Credit has to be given to PAS for diligently going from house to house to verify the information on the voter rolls. That these shenanigans are still going on show that the EC is thumbing its nose at the rakyat.

In the aftermath of Bersih 3.0 rally on April 28, all attention has been diverted from the voter rolls to the so-called rioting, police brutality, attacks on journalists and Bersih participants tearing down the barriers put up at Dataran Merdeka.

All these incidents served as a diversion from Bersih’s demands and this worked perfectly well for BN. Even the protests in front of S Ambiga’s house were meant to divert the focus away from Bersih’s eight-point demands for free and fair elections.

That the BN-friendly protesters sought to victimise Ambiga is a clear indication that the nation has descended to hooligan politics, courtesy of Umno-BN. The mission of the crony-protesters is to intimidate Ambiga but instead it gave more prominence to Bersih’s cause.

Machiavellian ploy?

Yet amidst all this victimisation suffered by Ambiga, the EC still refuses to clean up the voter rolls and reform the postal ballot. The EC has chosen to remain strangely silent in regard to Bersih’s demands. The BN government has also kept quiet on this issue.

There were ridiculous accusations by some parties that certain quarters were hijacking Bersih’s cause to topple the government through street protests. All this nonsense are attempts to divert attention from Bersih’s core issues.

And yet the top two EC officials continue in their job as if nothing had happened. For them it is business as usual.

They can only come up with silly statements without solid explanations when they proclaim that the voter roll is clean or that the people do not know anything about the electoral process.

The mainstream media is also playing a devilish role by sidelining the role of National Laureate A Samad Said, fondly known as Pak Samad as the Bersih co-chairperson. The racial card is at play here by making it seem that Bersih is an Indian lady’s initiative and the hidden agenda is to discourage Malays from supporting Bersih.

Is this a Machiavellian ploy to deny Bersih Malay support?

However, civil society should see through this evil intention in using the race card to divide society and we should not be diverted from Bersih’s cause.

Civil society should see that the current government is trampling on our rights when we demand for free and fair elections.

Selective amnesia

Still, the most deafening silence comes from none other than Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak himself. It was only last year that he had mentioned that he is all for fair and clean elections because BN wants to be seen winning in a clean and fair manner.

He must have forgotten his own words due to selective amnesia or a convenient lapse of memory.

Be that as it may, what happened to his Government Transformation Programme (GTP)? Are free and fair elections omitted from the GTP? And what about 1Malaysia’s People First, Performance Now? The people want clean elections, so what does he have to say to that?

That the top two EC officials have been exposed as Umno members elicited no response from the prime minister is an obvious indicator that BN just does not care about cleaning up the electoral process.

The only people who want electoral fraud are those who know that they cannot win without cheating.

Therefore those who win via electoral fraud are cheaters, liars and thieves as the rightful election result was stolen from the rakyat.

These rogues can form the government but they will fail to command the citizens’ respect nor the respect of the international community as they will be known worldwide as a rogue regime.

Back to the EC, it looks like there is no way to make them accede to our requests. There are those who say that then there should be Bersih 4.0, Bersih 5.0, Bersih 6.0 and so on. But will having a few more Bersih rallies solve the problem?

The best way is still to come out in full force to vote and take pictures of electoral fraud going on.

These pictures should be posted on YouTube or Facebook to let the whole world know so that we will not be the world’s laughing stock for having voted in a bunch of rogues.

And it looks like the EC is powerful enough to destroy our future by manipulating our votes to ensure that only the corrupt stay in power. Is there any solution to this predicament?

Selena Tay is a FMT columnist.