Guide to voting abroad

As submitted to www.ceku.org.uk and www.thecicak.com.

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As many of you are aware, Malaysia will be holding a general election on 8 March (the Saturday after next). For those of us eligible to vote, it is a crucial opportunity for us to exercise our democratic right to choose our leaders.

The big question, really, for those of us living abroad is – how?

Ignorant as hell, I simply assumed that having registered with the Elections Commission in Malaysia when I turned 21, all I had to do was visit the local Embassy and tick a box… until I rang the High Commission in London up. To my horror, I discovered that I needed to register as a postal voter, and that I had missed the deadline for that! So I’m not sure if this is going to be of any help at all, but here’s a made-easy guide to voting from abroad:

Step One:
Visit http://daftarj.spr.gov.my/daftarbi.asp and check if you are registered with the Elections Commission (SPR). It is definitely too late for you to register as a voter now.

Step Two:
Visit your local Malaysian Embassy/High Commission and fill in Form A (Borang A) to register as a postal voter. Make sure you bring your IC with you. (Some say bring 3 passport photos too!)

Step Three:
You will probably need to go down to your local Embassy/High Commission again on polling day (8 March) to mark your ballot papers and fill in Form 2 as you will need to do this in the presence of a returning officer (staff authorised by the SPR).

Please note however, that if you have yet to do the second step, that there is a 90% chance that your vote will not be accepted by SPR, according to the staff at the Malaysian High Commission in London. This is because we have already passed the formal deadline (5 February 2008, if I remember correctly) to register as a postal voter. This totally sucks, but I’m giving it a shot anyway.

It bothers me though, how hard it was to find out the procedures to voting abroad. SPR’s website needs a serious make over. Information found elsewhere (on the net) was either incomplete or unhelpful. Everyone has so much to say about the need to vote, but so little on how to.

Not only is such information hard to find, the information you find is sometimes inconsistent. For example, according to our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among the eligible voters are “Individuals studying full time abroad (only if they are sponsored by the Government)” (emphasis mine).This clearly contradicts the Election (Registration of Electors) Regulations 2002, which includes in its definition of an “absent voter” those “engaged in full-time studies at any university, training college or any higher educational institution outside the boundaries of Peninsular Malaysia or Sabah or Sarawak”.

And on top of it all, an issue affecting many Malaysians abroad is the question of eligibility. Some of you may have read about it in The Star -EC: Postal vote only for certain groups.

PUTRAJAYA: Malaysians living overseas cannot vote through the post unless they are military personnel, students, staff of embassies and high commissions and their spouses.

Election Commission (EC) secretary Datuk Kamaruzaman Mohd Noor advised them to
return home if they wanted to vote on March 8.

“The law does not provide for ordinary citizens living abroad to cast postal votes.”

Under the Election Regulations (Electoral Roll) 2002 and Election Regulations (Postal Votes) 2003, only three categories of citizens living overseas are allowed to cast postal votes.

This law certainly begs some looking into. How is it fair that ordinary Malaysians living abroad are denied the right to vote? Decisions made in parliament certainly affect them too, and more so like the ordinary citizen if they are returning to Malaysia soon. In principle, every stakeholder in a country should have a say in the laws and decisions made which ultimately affects us. And where our say is limited like it is in Malaysia, votes speak louder than words.

There’s nothing much we can do about this for this elections, but I think that it is only proper for the Elections Regulations to be amended in the near future to include any citizen of the country living abroad for a period of not longer than let’s say 10 or 20 years. This way, those who want to stay abroad for good can forfeit their right to vote, but not at the expense of others working abroad temporarily for purposes like gaining industrial training/experience.

Given the lack of information and the misinformation about voting from abroad, and the debatable conditions for postal voter eligibility, I cannot help but wonder if there is an invisible hand at work behind this to discourage those abroad from casting their vote.

The UK has the largest Malaysian population in Europe numbering around 11,000 students and more than 5,000 professionals. And yet, during the 2004 elections, only 23 postal ballots were cast, or a tiny 0.14% of the Malaysian population in the UK (excluding non-students and non-professionals). Voter turnout at home was a whopping 188 times more (6.9/25.5 million).

To those abroad who have actually completed steps one and two and are eligible to vote, I wish you the best! Please vote wisely. To those ineligible to vote, don’t make my mistake come the next General Elections – register as soon as you can! To everyone, please help spread the awareness about voting among your friends and family, especially if they are abroad.