Muda must get to voters on the ground, says party vice-president

 

Muda vice-president Lim Wei Jiet reaching out to Johor voters in March. (Facebook pic)

PETALING JAYA: Muda still needs to work on engaging voters on the ground to gain their trust, according to party vice-president Lim Wei Jiet.

In an interview with FMT, Lim said: “We need to show voters that we are trying to fight for them, instead of being people who only come around every five years to exploit their votes.”

The youth-based party, formed by former youth and sports minister Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, was officially registered with the Registrar of Societies last December and made its debut in the Johor elections in March.

Watch the video here.

Lim contested for the Tenang seat but lost to Haslinda Salleh of Barisan Nasional. Muda lost in five other seats, namely Larkin, Bukit Kepong, Parit Raja, Machap and Bukit Permai, but won in Puteri Wangsa.

Asked why youth voters did not seem to have boosted Muda’s chances in Johor, Lim said it was not correct to say that they did not vote for his party.

“In urban and semi-urban areas like Puteri Wangsa, youth voters were with Muda but in rural constituencies, Muda had to compete with BN and Perikatan Nasional (PN) very heavily for youth votes.

“If you look at the bigger picture, there was intense competition between Muda, BN and PN,” he told FMT.

However, the data showed that there was a low turnout of voters aged 18-21, due to many reasons, including the closure of the Johor-Singapore border and political apathy following the Sheraton Move which caused the downfall of the Pakatan Harapan government and the rise of Perikatan Nasional.

“Almost every Chinese household I visited in Tenang had a son or daughter who was working in Singapore who could not return to cast their ballot, but had come back to vote in the 2018 general election.

Lim Wei Jiet says young voters in urban and semi-urban seats did support Muda at the recent Johor elections.

“Also, after the Sheraton Move, many people felt like it was worthless to vote because politicians could just hop here and there,” he said, referring to the mass defection of MPs that led to the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government.

He said based on his encounters with people in Johor, many youths didn’t know about the automatic voter registration under the Undi18 initiative.

The Undi18 initiative and automatic voter registration, implemented from Dec 15, saw the creation of 173,177 new voters for the Johor elections from the 18-20-year-old age group.

The reform, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and allowed automatic voter registration, had expanded the Johor electorate by a third.

Lim said the Election Commission needed to do more to raise awareness and provide better access to voters, such as extending the period for postal voting registration to two or three weeks and allowing voting to take place at Malaysian embassies for those abroad.

He said it was important for young people to be educated on the importance of voting and that this could be taught early in secondary schools.

“We want voters to be informed at least about the policies or manifestos each party offers. We don’t want voters to be fed the wrong information and lack the ability to question,” said Lim. - FMT