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Saturday, February 24, 2018

Army man: I cast postal vote myself only once in 24 years of service

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SHAH ALAM: A former military officer has added to concerns about how well the authorities are administering postal votes, when he claimed today that he was given the opportunity to mark his own ballot through postal voting only once in his 24 years of service.
Lt Col (Rtd) Wong Ah Jit said although he was entitled to ask his supervisors why he was not given the chance to vote during all the other elections, he never did as he was a subordinate in the army.
“We should have asked but we did not,” he said, referring to his colleagues who were also not given the chance to cast their votes by postal voting themselves.
Without revealing which year it had happened, he said he was given a ballot paper when he was serving away from home and had marked it in a voting centre in the camp where he was stationed.
He said under a transparent system they could have questioned why they were not given the chance to vote, but did not do so.
Wong said this at a press conference held by the Malaysian Armed Forces Chinese Veterans Association (Macva), where he is honorary secretary, here today.
He was commenting on Bersih 2.0’s criticism against the Election Commission (EC) on Feb 21 for introducing nine new categories of postal voters.
The electoral watchdog said the EC had “quietly gazetted” the categories last year without justifying why they were considered eligible to vote remotely.
“This is also a step back from abolishing postal voting and to replace it with advance voting a day before polling day,” Bersih 2.0 had said.
On Thursday, National Patriots Association (Patriot) president Brig-Gen (Rtd) Mohamed Arshad Raji said postal voting should be stopped for army personnel and policemen, reasoning that it was not needed given the country’s peaceful status.
Macva president Maj (Rtd) Tan Pau Son, who was present at today’s press conference, said he agreed with Arshad that postal voting should be done away with.
“Why should we have postal voting when the officers are stationed in KL?” he said.
He said camp supervisors could arrange for officers on duty to go vote for themselves in separate batches in the morning and afternoon.
Tan also said ballot boxes containing officers’ postal votes were kept in police stations, without camera surveillance, where it was uncertain if they were protected from tampering.
Meanwhile, Macva deputy president Maj (Rtd) Godfey Chang said supervisors in military camps must ensure their subordinates were able to mark their ballot papers themselves and not have someone else mark them.
“If there are 1,000 men there, then there must be 1,000 ballot papers available for all of them,” he said. -FMT

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