Looks like election observer bashing has extended to the Senate. Senator Idris Buang tried to paint election observer group Mafrel as biased and partisan in a senate debate. His evidence? Mafrel is registered as a business entity with RM2 paid-up capital. But Mafrel managed to bring out `thousands' of volunteers, so it must be funded from overseas and is a foreign power's spokesperson!
Lastly, his `homework' led him to say that a founder of Mafrel had been a PKR Youth leader. What a load of bull. While we cannot speak for Mafrel, the reasoning given are stereotypical prejudices which ruling politicians like to air to confuse the public about the honourable role of election observers in general. They must therefore be refuted.
Firstly, many NGOs who find it taking too long to apply for society registration in Malaysia resort to registering themselves under business registration which only takes one day!
The government can easily get NGOs to register under the Registrar of Society - just register them as quickly as you register a business. Why registering public interest bodies take much longer than registering profit-oriented bodies baffles many.
Secondly, for every ringgit of aid given to NGOs, thousands more go to the government from foreign governments under their various foreign aid programmes. If receiving foreign aid implies becoming a stooge, then the Malaysian government should stop accepting all foreign aid that coming into Malaysia straight away.
It is not easy to know if one of the founders of Mafrel (there are numerous) mentioned was a PKR Youth leader at the time that Mafrel was founded or at some other time. The senator from PBB never provided details to make his allegation more credible. Why the deliberate silence? Are you afraid that the truth will dismantle your prejudicial mudslinging?
Back to the bigger picture of election observation. It has been mostly a volunteer-based citizen movement all over the world where the numbers can go up to half-a-million as in the Philippines once.
The reason? Many citizens find their country's elections badly run or even rob them of their real vote. They want to keep an eye on their elections and to take ownership of the elections so that the best leaders can be elected to lead them. It is a right nobody can take away from them - not even when so-called election commissions say they don't `need' them.
The Malaysian Election Commission’s words didn't mean independent observers were or are `banned' from observing elections in Hulu Selangor or Sibu. Observers will still operate outside the polling centers and will keep pressuring the EC for accreditation - a right which many countries affirm in their laws so as to give more credence to the elections they hold.
Malaysia remains one of the few countries which does not allow accreditation to election observers whether local or internationally as a matter of legal right.
The EC holds absolute discretion over whether to give accreditation to observers thus allowing it to veto its own public monitors. The reason for giving this power to the EC cannot in any way be justified on public interests grounds.
So citizens who don't like abuses of government facilities for campaigning; who don't like vote- buying with instant government projects and who don't like the EC to operate under partisan control should all join the few election observer groups to show that Malaysians can also come out in the thousands to do something for public good - even without big fat allowances as suspected by the unelected senators!
