‘No plans to extend postal voting for Sabahans, S’wakians’

THERE is no plan by the Election Commission (EC) to extend postal voting for Sabahans and Sarawakians who are not unable to return home to vote in their respective constituencies, says Datuk Mas Ermieyati Samsudin.

“There is currently no need to extend postal voting for Sabahans and Sarawkians,” the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Parliament and Law) said when replying to a question by Datuk Rozman Isli (Warisan-Labuan).

She said postal voting was only allowed for groups such as the EC and security personnel including media employees who were involved in managing and covering the election process.

However, Mas Ermieyati took note of a suggestion by Rozman to prohibit the use of mobile handphones at polling stations.

“Is the prohibition of handphones at polling stations going to be part of the EC reforms?

“It is no secret that numerous breaches of EC regulations including activities that were bribery in nature, were carried out using the handphones,” he said.

At present, Mas Ermieyati said voters were only prohibited from taking their ballot papers outside the polling stations.

“However, there have been instances, that have gone viral, showing irresponsible voters taking a photograph of their ballot papers and posting it on their social media accounts.

“Such behaviour should not have happened,” she said.

She told Rozman that his suggestion to ban handphones at polling stations would be brought up to the EC.

To a question by Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh (PH-Ledang), Mas Ermieyati said the EC had yet to conduct a post-mortem on the low voter turnout during the recent Johor state polls on March 12.

She acknowledged that the 54% voter turnout was below the 70% target set by the EC and was unhealthy for the nation’s democratic process.

Syed Ibrahim also noted that 36,729 voting slips were issued through the EC online registration, including 7,814 postal votes for Malaysians living abroad.

“This represents only 0.04% out of the over 200,000 Malaysians working in Singapore,” he said, adding that he wanted to know the reason behind the low numbers.

Mas Ermieyati said it was likely due to those who were “lazy” to come out to vote.

“They were likely those who were lazy to come out to vote as they were the ones who didn’t even bother to register themselves as voters in the first place,” she said.

The recent amendments to the Federal Constitution allowed for automatic registration of Malaysians who had turned 18.