COMMENT A rally like the one in Kelana Jaya last night whose attendance was in six figures on a matter like the alleged fraud in last Sunday's polls only means one thing - the issue won't go away.

Like Banquo's revenant ghost that haunted the murderer in Shakespeare's Macbeth and brought the culprit to dissolution, this huge rally and its planned sequels are going to disturb the sangfroid of suspects complicit in the grand larceny that took place in the late of the night on May 5, 2013.

Rallies planned for Ipoh tomorrow (this one is still tentative) and for Penang on Saturday, are going to garner crowds, if not as huge as the one in Kelana Jaya last night then even larger - that's sure to put a blowtorch to the trail of the Election Commission which will be difficult to extinguish.

NONE This body and the conduct of its egregious chair, Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof ( left ), over the last three years puts one in mind of a phrase, "the banality of evil", which captured a profound insight of its author, Hannah Arendt, when the philosopher appraised a "terrifyingly normal" man, Adolf Eichmann, who helped turn the extermination of a people into bureaucratic routine.

Since Arendt coined the phrase when writing about her experience observing Eichmann in the dock at his trial in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, the "banality of evil" has come to apply to bureaucrats who, unthinking but obedient, take some baleful task to which they have been assigned to a higher level efficiency while inuring themselves to all feelings of responsibility and remorse.

Nothing so epitomised the soullessness of this mindset than Abdul Aziz's most recent pronouncement that those on the electoral rolls are eligible to vote if they showed up to do so with valid citizenship papers; nary a care here for the dubious methods by which some of the eligible had obtained their papers.

When the chief invigilator of the electoral process in this country, in the teeth of compelling evidence collated over a long period of time that our rolls are tainted by the presence of foreigners not entitled to citizenship and the vote, and newly confirmed by revelations from a royal commission's inquest into the matter in Sabah, can make such a claim, Arendt's arresting phrase has had its graphic embodiment.

Crime of grand polls larceny

Judging from the crowds that drove polls reform advocacy group Bersih's second and third rallies, in July 2011 and April 2012 respectively, last night's gathering at Kelana Jaya - braving rain and horrendous traffic congestion - indicates that the bandwagon of grand rectification for the crime of grand polls larceny is set to roll.

This embryonic start recalls the spontaneity of the crowds in Manila in February 1986 when the Filipino people took to the streets to demonstrate their protest against the fraud that had marred the vote in the presidential contest between incumbent Ferdinand Marcos and challenger Corazon Aquino.

NONE It took a mutiny within the ranks of the country's armed forces to compel dictator Marcos and his corrupt coterie to flee before the massed anger of his people.

It is hoped there will be no need for the intervention of personnel in the uniformed units here to assist one side or the other in the dramas to come over the widespread suspicion that the results of GE13 are tainted beyond repair.

Here in Malaysia, the conviction that gushes like a geyser behind ordinary citizens' willingness to protest last Sunday's general election result is driven by the fact that Pakatan Rakyat outpolled the ruling BN by something like 400,000 votes in the popular tally.

NONE The BN haul of 133 parliamentary seats from a 5.2 million take of the gross vote is inherently incredible though, admittedly, ours is a system that gives more weightage to rural wards over urban ones, and BN has the edge over its rivals on the rural score.

Voters are asked to believe that a deficit of 400,000 in the popular vote can still afford the BN a 44-seat parliamentary surplus.

Only the hypnotised can be expected to believe in this math. The mood and size of the crowds in Kelana Jaya last night suggest that they are not in the mood for the romanticism that entails a willing suspension of disbelief.

So expect swelling attendances at the next few public rallies in protest of the GE13 results.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.

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