Malaysia’s diversity on display

Everyone came: Including new bride Lee Choy Yoong, still in her wedding dress, at the SK Taman Muda voting centre in Kuala Lumpur for the Pandan parliamentary seat. — YAP CHEE HONG/The Star

MY left index finger inked, I spent last Saturday afternoon as a novice polling agent at a secondary school in Segambut constituency.

Segambut, Kuala Lumpur, was where I first registered as a voter when I was 21 and where I voted at every election until I decided to change my constituency to where I live in Lembah Pantai. Wanting to do more than just vote this time round, I decided to volunteer as a Paca (polling agent/counting agent). But my own constituency already had enough so, naturally, I turned to the nearest one.

It was an eye-opening experience which I hope every Malaysian will have at least once. I learnt so much about how the election process works.

Admittedly, at first it was intimidating having to learn so many regulations, laws and forms but to my relief, as a newbie I was assigned to the afternoon shift where I did not have to scrutinise everything to make sure all was in order. The morning shift had already done that.

Also, the thought that I would be alone in the room representing the side I was helping felt like a heavy burden on my shoulders.

I turned up for a short briefing by my very capable station master before I was assigned to my saluran or stream. My station had a lot of voters so we had 12 streams in all with about 600 names on the electoral rolls for each stream. I had to observe Stream 10 which was for voters aged about 26 to 29.

First, I must say that the officers appointed by the Election Commission in my room were very diligent and professional. They checked every IC and made sure all voters’ hands were free of any ink marks and then gave them their ballot papers. It was a very smooth process and neither I nor my fellow polling agent from another party had any trouble doing our duties.

Before the elections, voters had so many questions about what they could and could not do while voting. So many women asked about whether they could wear nail polish for example. Others worried about dress codes, whether they would be allowed to vote if they wore shorts and slippers. I thought it was a bit silly to deny any citizen the right to vote based on their attire.

Sure enough, in my saluran at least, nobody bothered about what people wore. There were shorts as well as jubah, sneakers as well as flip-flops. Nobody was stopped from voting.

Undoubtedly my stream, and indeed the entire polling station, was not representative of all of Malaysia. But it was interesting to observe regardless. Malaysia’s diversity was on full display.

There were all sorts of names on the roll, some of which were unexpected. A few names sounded foreign but since they didn’t turn up (or were in the morning session) I could not verify if they were indeed Malaysian. But given that they had to show ICs, I suppose they are the result of intermarriage and born in this country. Some Chinese names belonged to people who looked Malay, and some Malay names belonged to very Chinese-looking voters.

There was all manner of dress and given that this was a young stream, all sorts of hair colours. One woman with multi-coloured hair came in an all-black caftan. Outside in the corridor, voters queueing for an even younger age group stream sported fully green heads, patchwork red heads and several Afros. There were also a lot of blondes.

I’m sure that in other constituencies, diversity appeared in different ways. Everyone may have looked similar, but they likely thought differently. As a result, they voted for different parties, and the result is, as we saw on the night of Nov 19, the most diverse coalition had the greatest number of seats.

Waiting for a government to be formed is a bit like playing Wordle, if any readers are as addicted to the word game as my friends and I are. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. Invariably, unless extremely lucky, you start with the wrong word. From then on, it’s a process of elimination until you get the correct combination of letters in the right order. If you’re very smart, you might get the answer in two or three tries. I usually get it in three or four attempts.

But if you get to the fifth attempt and still have not found the word, you start breathing a little faster and you search your brain for the only possible words you could use.

The worst case is when you have most of the letters which could form any number of words. For example, you have O, A, S, and T which could be “toast”, “coast”, or “boast”. You hesitate and scratch your head because you only have that one chance to get it right. Getting Wordle entirely wrong and then seeing how obvious the answer is makes you feel like a dunce.

This entire week I managed to finish my daily Wordles within four tries. But watching the daily announcements of the various combinations that would make up the new government felt like we were heading towards the sixth and final try at solving the game. Or even worse, not solving it at all.

Luckily, we did get it at the last try (or at least it felt like it), pulling ourselves back from the brink just in time. It’s not the greatest government we could ever have but it’s also not the worst. At least now the one most of us voted for has the legitimacy to rule for five years and prove its mettle. Otherwise, we’ll just go back to the ballot box.

Malaysia was mentioned in a recent article in The New York Times about good news about democracy. We had peaceful elections, and we accepted the results despite it being a situation we have never experienced before, unlike a certain advanced country. I’m glad the writer did not have to revise that article.

Well done, Malaysian voters. Now it’ll be our job to keep the government we voted for on their toes.

Marina Mahathir is not great at Wordle but fares better with the more complicated Quordle and Octordle. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.