In a function to launch a report on Malaysian election system in UTM, Abdul Rashid Rahman, the Election Commission chief, implicitly criticised the ruling party for jeopardising the standard of Malaysian elections. In fact, he graded democracy in Malaysia which includes its current electoral system, as `C' - a border line `pass' case!

This together with UTM's finding that over a quarter of the voters (26.9%) consider the Malaysian elections as unfair - with only slightly more than two-thirds (65.6%) thinking that their votes are secret. The EC chief's opinion and these official findings deal a heavy blow to the Malaysian election system which has been heavily influenced by the ruling Umno/BN for the past half a century.

Perhaps showing how the above perceptions are significantly influencing voters' perception of the relevance of voting, a very high proportion( four million) of eligible citizens have not bothered yet to register as voters. What a shocker.

UTM's study also found that of the four million mentioned above close to two-thirds (65.6%) are youths aged between 22-30. Another dimension to this apathy is that non-Malays don't think (by 47.4%) their interests are affected by whoever becomes the country's leaders - thus causing about half of these citizens (49%) to think that voting is not important!

These findings are really a big vote of no-confidence to the Malaysian election system. Since many of the country's youth are involved, it also means that the future of the Malaysian electoral system is bleak. The ruling parties cannot afford to sit on this sad state of affairs if they are to avoid being seen as preferring or benefitting from voter apathy.

Nothing less than overhauling the entire election system - seen by a significant segment of potential voters as unfair with no secrecy for the vote - is needed here. The ruling parties' rejection of automatic voter registration upon the age of 21 is suspect - do they really have an interest in a low new voter registration rate?

The excuse that automatic registration will lead to `phantom voters' doesn't stand up in the face of weaknesses in the existing system which allow many opportunities for phantom voters to interfere in election - a recurrent complaint in all past elections.