The Sorry State of Malaysian Elections

Malaysian Election Commission and Foreign Missions try their best to deprive overseas Malaysians of their right to vote

Batu Gajah MP Fong Po Kuan once said that Malaysians overseas wanted to exercise their right to vote because they loved the country. This prompted Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz to lash out: “If they really love Malaysia, they should come back and vote. They willingly went abroad and stayed there for five, six years and didn’t come back. It means they don’t love Malaysia.”

The Federal Constitution under Article 119 guarantees every citizen’s constitutional right to vote in an election provided (a) he or she has attained the age of 21; (b) is resident in a constituency or, if not so resident, is an absent voter; and (c) is registered in the electoral roll as an elector in the constituency in which he or she resides on the qualifying date, unless he or she is disqualified under the law.

There you go, so they have the right to vote!

But this right has been amended under the Elections (Registration of Electors) Regulations 2002 so that, of the Malaysians residing overseas, only four categories are allowed to register as an absent voter:

> A serving member of the Armed Forces.

> A public servant serving overseas.

> A full-time student who is studying overseas.

> Spouses of the three aforementioned categories who are living with their spouse at the date of application for registration.

This effectively means that all the illustrious personalities mentioned at the start of this article cannot vote while overseas. They are among the estimated 784,900 Malaysians working overseas. If you include the spouses, the figure could easily touch a million.

Political analyst Dr Ong Kian Ming put forth two reasons why overseas Malaysians do not enjoy equal right to vote: logistics and politics. He noted that because of the constituency-based elections in Malaysia, it is a big hassle to send individual ballots to voters overseas who vote in constituencies all over Malaysia.

“It is a messy logistical process and exercise, and if nobody pushes (the Election Commission) to act, the EC won’t do anything about it. As Malaysians overseas are more likely to be financially independent and think differently from Malaysians back home, it may be assumed that they are more likely to vote for the Opposition. Hence, there has been little political desire to make a concerted effort to incorporate more Malaysians into the electoral process,” said Ong.

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