Too disillusioned to be voters?

Automatic voter registration won't change a thing unless apathy is addressed.

COMMENT

Malay rights group Perkasa has called for the automatic registration of Malaysians as voters once they reach the age of 21, which is not all that bad an idea, especially considering that all the relevant information is stored in a database. Digitisation has made using government facilities so much less of a hassle that extending this to our voting system just seems to make sense. It would solve the age-old problem of how to get people to vote. Or would it?

Perkasa’s concern is that Malays, especially in urban areas, are simply not signing up to be voters. It’s vice-president, Abdul Rashid Rahman, himself a former Elections Commission chairman, said that in KL, for example, the Chinese outnumbered the Malays as registered voters, although their population sizes were almost equal.

According to Rashid, there were three million unregistered, eligible voters nationwide during the last general election, and of that number, 2.4 million were Malays. He also said that there were, in addition, 600,000 Malays eligible to vote in GE14 who had not registered. So far, then, we have three million Malays who can vote in the next general election but are not interested in doing so.

Now, the move for automatic voter registration is one that will require debate. For the most part, however, it is a sound idea.

The real issue at hand concerns the alarming number of unregistered eligible Malay voters and why they have chosen not to register. The Malays have generally been politically active. So how do we account for this contradiction?

One likely explanation is disillusionment.

Politics in Malaysia is something of an echo chamber. It is filled with a great many noisy people, and everyone has an opinion when it comes to Malay issues. These noises build into crescendos, with everyone seeming to agree on something, and then you find out that no one outside that echo chamber gives a hoot.

Take, for example, the September 16 Red Shirts rally. Jamal Yunos and his cohorts whipped the crowd into a frenzy before and during the rally, and hot-blooded youths filled the streets, some honestly thinking this was how they were going to get change for the better, that Umno would somehow do something to ease their economic burdens, which they believed were caused by Chinese domination of the economy. However, as shown in a Malay Mail article based on recent interviews with some of the rally goers, the erstwhile Red Shirts have realised that they are now worse off economically. The government they defended has, since the rally, hiked highway toll rates and transport fares and then had the cheek to ask the people to live frugally.

What could be more disillusioning than that? Played as pawns and forgotten afterwards, made to believe you were gloriously ushering a new, fairer era but ultimately forgotten.

PAS is not much better either these days, given its upcoming political marriage with Umno, a move that is surely dismaying its hardcore grassroots, who fought the fight alongside the late Tok Guru Nik Aziz against the same entity Hadi Awang is now moving to embrace.

If you were a PAS loyalist, one who hewed to Tok Guru’s ideals and his steadfast rejection of Umno and its culture, what would this move mean to you?

It is clear that between Umno and PAS, most Malays are caught in a Catch-22, and there is no other real viable choice. So, let’s say you’re Malay and turning 21 next year. Would you bother to register as a voter?

Yes, disillusionment often leads to apathy, and unless apathy is addressed, automatic voter registration won’t change a thing. You can be a registered voter and still not turn up to vote.