Bersih chairman Pham Binh Dong today suggested that the Election Commission should restructure overseas voters and make seven reforms before the 15th general election to allow half of the overseas voters of about 1 million to 1.7 million to cast ballots by mail The voter turnout in the next general election was raised to 55-60%.
Fan Pingdong said that if the current procedures for dealing with overseas mail-in ballots are still used, the Election Commission simply cannot handle more than 10,000 overseas mail-in ballots.
He pointed out that during the COVID-19 MCO, according to the statistics of former Johor state minister Datuk Hasni, about 200,000 Johor citizens were stranded in Singapore, so the 7,814 postal votes for the Johor state election were far lower than this number. According to a 2019 United Nations data, there are 1,730,152 Malaysian citizens in the global diaspora.
7 reforms in the general election
1 There should be 28 days from the announcement of the dissolution of the parliament to the day before the nomination day, so that overseas postal voters can register as postal voters in time, unlike the just-concluded Johor state election, which has only 10 days to register.
- The election period should not be less than 25 days, allowing enough time for overseas mail voters to send the ballots back in time before the polling day.
- Voting instructions or steps that overseas voters come into contact with, whether online or offline, should be explained in bilingual English and Malay
- Abolish Form 2 (Borang 2 signatures must be witnessed by witnesses, because in overseas cities or regions, there may be a Malaysian who is the overseas voter.
- The Election Committee can coordinate with Malaysian overseas embassies to promote the referendum awareness of overseas voters and educate them about the mail-in ballot procedure, latest information and deadlines.
- The Election Committee should abolish the process of printing overseas ballots, forms 2 and envelopes, and allow overseas voters who have registered accounts in the MySPR account to download the required ballots and other documents (PDF version) from the MySPR official website by themselves, in order to save 5 Up to 14 days of printing, enveloping and shipping time, while saving labor costs and reducing human error.
- On the day of the close of voting and the counting of ballots, the scrutineer (PACA) shall supervise the overseas mailed ballots. Only one ballot per person will be counted, and no more than one ballot shall be counted.
