Salleh: Dr M's election fraud claim shows Harapan knows defeat inevitable

Caretaker communication and multimedia minister Salleh Said Keruak has claimed that Pakatan Harapan knows it will be defeated in the coming general election.

The Umno treasurer-general based this on Harapan chairperson Dr Mahathir Mohamad's latest blog posting, which contained a long list of how caretaker prime minister Najib Abdul Razak would purportedly cheat in the coming polls.

Salleh said opposition leaders had done the same prior to the last general election in 2013.

“Just before the 2013 general election, Pakatan Rakyat (Harapan's predecessor) leaders went all over the country saying that BN was going to cheat to win the election.

“After the election, they said the lights went out due to a power failure in certain places while the votes were being counted, extra ballot boxes were brought in to certain places, tens of thousands of phantom voters were flown in from Bangladesh, and so on,” he added in a blog post this afternoon.

However, Salleh said all the allegations were proven false.

“Even the Bangladesh embassy denied that tens of thousands of its nationals were flown in to vote in Malaysia, which would require more than 100 chartered planes.

“And the places where they said the lights went out confirmed that they never experienced any power failure plus the opposition workers in the places where they said extra ballot boxes were brought in denied that incident,” he added.

Salleh described the allegations as a pre-emptive strike on the part of the opposition as it knew that it would be defeated in the polls.

Therefore, he claimed that a similar modus operandi was being employed for the coming May 9 national polls as well.

“They knew they would not win GE13 so before the election, they 'predicted' they would lose due to fraud and after the election, they raised all sorts of allegations of fraud to explain why they lost.

“Now they are doing it again. Mahathir said in his blog today that Najib is going to cheat in GE14 so that when they lose the election they can save face by blaming it on fraud like they did in 2013,” he added. - Mkini