For years, BN had the advantage of postal votes from the army and police, and selectively to their advantage, Malaysians who reside overseas. Sensing the growing discontent among the voters for this coming General Election, the Election Commission (read BN) has proposed amendments which include a new Proxy voting system which is open to large scale abuse in the form of vote control, vote-trading and would create a market with the potential of deciding which coalition is going to win the general election!
To give an example, the proxy system of a club is likely to be abused by a small group of people who make it a point to go to inactive members (who do not care who are running the show), to collect signed proxy forms for nominees to vote on their behalf. The rationale of the original purpose of a proxy system would include the right of members who do not attend the Annual General Meeting to vote. But where the system degrades to canvassing for such votes, it defeats the purpose of providing such right to the members. In other words, if he is keen to see someone elected, he should be keen enough to attend. Here again, the common scenario at the AGM would be less than 10 percent of members attending and out of those, a majority for a certain individual can be easily defeated by another who has canvassed for the signed proxy forms.
To extend it further, abuse of the system can include fraud in the form of control over the proxy forms to be sent out to members. Just imagine the interested party having access to these forms through collusion with a member of staff, and forged the signatures of the intended members. I believe this is the part which worries the PR leaders. We have seen how the process of postal voting of the army and police was opaque and the voting in front of superiors less than independent. There was even allegation of someone designated to vote BN from a pile of voting slips! The proxy voting system could similarly be abused.
The new rules which would result from the proposed amendments are another source of concern to PR. From past experience, just the rule on the banning of tents outside election centres was abused to BN's advantage. When PR workers were unaware, the tents were allowed at the last minute! Guess who knew about this change of rule before hand?
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