Making it ‘EC’ for voters
THE Election Commission’s main duties are very clear – to carry out its function of conducting elections so it continues to enjoy public confidence, says former Election Commission (EC) chairman Tan Sri Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman.
“This means that if at any one time, there is a lot of dissatisfaction about the way the commission functions and does things, then the commission itself or the Government must react and address the complaint or dissatisfaction.
“When a country develops, there will be more demands for change from civil society, who want to see a strengthening of democratic practices in elections, which I think is a fair request,” says Rashid in an interview.
He should know – he has managed six of Malaysia’s 12 general elections so far in a career spanning nearly 30 years.
He was EC secretary from 1979, and later its chairman, from 2000 to 2008.
He retired shortly after the 2008 general election, a watershed poll which among others galvanised calls to improve electoral laws and practices. That push culminated in a Parliamentary Select Committee on Electoral Reform last year which adopted new measures including the use of indelible ink and an expansion of postal voting facilities to more overseas Malaysians.
Rashid says the calls for change in fact started much earlier, shortly before he took office as EC chairman.
Following the 1999 general election, which came in the aftermath of game-changing events such as the Asian economic downturn, the downfall of Indonesia’s president Suharto as well as the sacking of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim as deputy prime minister, led to much soul-searching for better democracy in Malaysia.
Rashid says the pressure began to grow in 2000 with various groups submitting memoranda to the EC calling for changes and asking why certain electoral practices that had been set in the 1950s had not been revised.
According to him, they wanted a total review of Malaysia’s electoral laws to bring them in line with those in advanced countries in the West as well as Thailand and Indonesia, “which had by then introduced far more advanced laws than ours in terms of democratic practices.”
Having served as EC secretary for 17 years, Rashid realised there was a need to relook the functions and powers of the EC enacted shortly after Independence but which had yet to be updated.
“Up to when I took office there had not been any major structural changes in election laws and practices, and I noticed that there were missing components in our electoral laws which are relevant to maintaining a level playing field in the election process,” says Rashid.
He made several suggestions to the Government in 2004 to address the “missing components”, one of which involved political party financing.
He proposed all political parties receive a grant by the Government based on their membership size, that is, RM1 for every registered member. This money would then be used for operational costs.
The proposal aimed to give smaller politi- cal parties a better chance of survival, which Rashid says, is crucial for democracy to remain healthy in the country.
“People like to help the established parties such as those in the Barisan Nasional or Pakatan Rakyat, but how many other parties have you heard of?
“Very few, and that’s because most of them have disappeared over time because they were not financially capable.” The Government rejected his proposal. “It can be frustrating because all the time you are seen as a body that supposedly controls everything about elections when, in the end, we can only operate within the constraints of our electoral laws as we are not a law-making body that can make change happen, only Parliament can do that.”
Apart from keeping election laws and practices up to date with the development of democracy, another challenge especially in the early stage of his career involved logistics.
“In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s we were still facing major logistical hurdles due to issues such a lack of roads in the interior,” he says.
He recalls how EC personnel and volunteers in Sabah and Sarawak often had little choice but to travel by foot.
Carrying their own supplies through thick jungle or timber tracks, they brought ballot boxes to as many remote villages as possible so that rural voters could cast their votes and participate in the democratic process.
Poor rural connectivity made polling a lengthy process. In the 1969 general election, it took 28 days to complete the voting process in Sarawak, according to EC records.
Neighbouring Sabah fared slightly better, taking 15 days in the next general election in 1974. It was much better in the peninsula, which could by then conduct polling in a day from the 1974 polls onwards.
By 1999, staggered voting was no longer necessary and polling could be done in a day nationwide.
In the years ahead, Rashid says that managing calls by an increasingly mature citizenry for democracy and electoral practices to be strengthened will continue to be the EC’s biggest challenge.
He notes, however, that some changes may not necessarily make things better. He cites for example a switch from Malaysia’s current first-past-the-post electoral system to a proportional one where the number of seats won by a party would be proportional to the number of votes it receives.
Rashid says the proportional system, in use in Australia, Italy and Indonesia, might be better in terms of democratic practice, but it came with a price.
“With proportional representation, you will more easily get a hung parliament which results in a coalition Government and that normally leads to instability.
“We need to ask ourselves, are we ready for this possibility?”