Pakatan's crazy phantom voter game

IMAGINARY: The general election is over but opposition leaders seem unable to come to terms with the ghost of election past 

ONE swallow does not a summer make, especially if the swallow is just an imaginary one created on the Internet to hoodwink the people. For most, the 13th General Election (GE13) is over and done with but Pakatan leaders seem unable to come to terms with the ghost of election past. Never mind that the "phantom voters" that haunt them are just imaginary, by virtue of the evidence (or rather the lack of it) gathered during GE13. 

The incident in the Ladang constituency in Kuala Terengganu, where three former Universiti Malaysia Terengganu students were prevented from casting their votes by Pas supporters, speaks volumes about the phantom voters paranoia which the opposition had created. The Indian youths from Kedah and Penang, aged between 24 and 27, were mistaken as Bangladeshis and threatened with a parang by the Pas supporters in their overzealous quest to find phantom voters. 

When making assessment of news, one must not have any prejudice in order to make a sound judgment on its trustworthiness. However, the deluge of speculations and allegations on the Internet of about 40,000 Bangla-deshi phantom voters being flown in a few days before polling day left no room for opposition supporters to think objectively about the situation. Instead of clearing up the air by providing evidence about the phantom voters, the opposition stoked up their supporters anger by spreading the allegations in its political rallies. 

Out of the 12 million registered voters, more than 10 million cast their votes on polling day -- a record turnout for the country. Even if we were to assume that the 40,000 phantom voters existed, that would just be 0.4 per cent of the total voters' turnout. Divide the 0.4 per cent by 222 parliamentary seats (the state seats don't count as the opposition were upset at not being able to wrest Putrajaya) then the number will be much smaller. 

With the phantom voters being spread so thinly, how could the BN strategists -- whom the opposition had dismissed as being of little use because they could not think of how to reduce the price of petrol and increase the royalty payment by Petronas to 20 per cent simultaneously as promised in the opposition's manifesto -- translate the handful of phantom voters into a sure win? 

One of the footages in opposition-linked blogs showed dark-skinned men, said to be the Bangladeshi phantom voters, being ferried out of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in vans. If a van can accommodate 10 men, it would take 4,000 vans to ferry them. If a bus can carry 40 people, it will take 1,000 buses to take them all over Malaysia. These are just the logistics and it is already mind-boggling. 

It is no secret that the number of legal and illegal foreign workers here is huge, but why were the Bangladeshis singled out as the purported choice of BN to be used as phantom voters? Why not Indonesians, whose physical appearance closely match the Malays? If one may speculate (the phantom voters issue was based on mere speculation anyway), the election results that showed a 60 per cent increase of Indian votes for BN may provide a clue. 

If the allegations of Bangladeshi phantom voters, whose features closely resembled those of the local Indians, were created to lessen the Indians' chance of voting, then the case of the three former UMT students in Ladang showed that whoever had spread them had succeeded to some extent. 

The rallies organised by the opposition to protest the GE13 results attracted hundreds of thousands, voicing their support for a review of the so-called tainted results. Since the opposition had garnered more than five million votes in GE13, the thousands who thronged the rallies were only to be expected. However, the post-election gathering at the Rusila mosque last week has a distinctly different air as the ones held elsewhere in the country. 

True, the crowd size was comparable to the rallies held in the west coast but they were celebrating their unprecedented achievements in GE13, not about rejecting the results. If they were to reject the results, Pas president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang, who spoke at length about the excellent achievements of Pakatan in GE13, would have to declare that his win in Marang and Rhu Rendang were also null and void. 

Using the same argument, maybe opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will call for the resignation of Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng as the rally to reject the GE13 results there was a resounding success. 

If Anwar were to say that only the results where BN win were unacceptable, then he would have to reveal how he was sure that the results where the opposition emerged victorious were not tainted by phantom voters. 

If he could give a valid explanation on that, then perhaps he could give all the details of the phantom voters since he has such intimate knowledge of the phantom voters distribution. Then maybe, just maybe, the Malaysians who were prevented from voting or harassed by opposition's ghost busters could get an explanation on why the politicians who shouted for democracy had worked so hard at denying them their democratic rights.

--NST