 WIDE ANGLE
By HUZIR SULAIMAN Once every five years, our columnist gets all worked up. It’s that time again.
I started voting as soon as I was old enough to be eligible, and I’m proud to say I cast my ballot in the 1999 and 2004 General Elections. To be honest, I haven’t been hugely lucky with elections – nobody I’ve voted for has actually won, or even come anywhere near winning, the poor chaps – but that hasn’t stopped me. Whether it’s because I love suffrage, or merely because I love suffering, I keep coming back for more. I only wish more of my friends and acquaintances shared my passion for the polls. Some say there isn’t any political party they feel comfortable supporting; others say they never quite got around to registering; a few, I suspect, just don’t want to wait in line on a day they could spend catching up on American Idol, or eating tiramisu, or doing sudoku. I realise I might be preaching a particularly fundamentalist strain of democracy, but I have always believed that having the right to vote translates directly to having a responsibility to vote. In the parliamentary system, the idea of electing representatives is that we symbolically turn over to them our innate authority both to make laws and to form a government to implement those laws and pursue the national interest. That symbolic transfer of authority is crucial. If we can’t even be bothered to participate in the process of selecting the proxies who will legislate and administer on our behalf, we give up the right to criticise the manner in which we are subsequently governed by those proxies. In short: Vote, or shut up. 
| Than Chee Beng made the effort to vote in Bukit Merah, Perak, in 1999. What about you? |
Note that this is very different from “Vote, and then shut up”, which is the view taken by most Asian autocracies. Ongoing criticism, debate and dissent are vital. But if, after being offered the chance to choose, we decline to get involved in the beginning of the political cycle – the election – there’s little point in wandering in later with our grouses. If you’re not eligible to vote, whether you’re too young or a Malaysian abroad, you still have the right to comment, in my book, because you are subject to policies that you couldn’t possibly have influenced. But once you gain (or regain) the right to vote, you are morally obliged to take a stand and cast your ballot. Look around Southeast Asia, and you see Communist states, military dictatorships, recovering dictatorships, fractious democracies, fragile democracies, “guided” democracies? and then there’s us. We’re one of the few places where people don’t have to worry about tanks rumbling through the streets if they vote in the wrong party. In the context of Southeast Asia, our democratic freedoms, deeply flawed though they may be, are a precious commodity, and shouldn’t be taken for granted. If we aren’t vigilant in the exercise of our rights, those few freedoms might evaporate. In short: Use your vote, or lose your vote. Our voter turnout has never been anything to boast about. The high was back in 1964, with 78.9% of eligible voters showing up. The low point was in 1986, with just 69.97%. At other times we have bounced along in the low 70s.It’s better than the United States, but that’s not saying much. We should aim for an 80% voter turnout at this election. After 50 years of independence, it’s time we got more involved. (We might not be able to do better than 80%, realistically, because there will always be some voters in hospital with dengue fever; and of course, going by the alarming crime rates, a large number of voters will be the victims of snatch theft on the way to the polling station, thereby losing their identity cards and being unable to prove that they are actual living, registered voters, as opposed to, say, one of 200 dead voters living in the same two-room house.) Anecdotal evidence suggests that voter turnout is low among the educated and English-speaking. Readers of The Star, basically. I sincerely hope someone will come up with figures to show that I’m wrong, but that’s the way it looks. Excuses for not voting abound. The idea that by not voting one can somehow register “a protest against the whole political system” is utterly nonsensical. You wouldn’t be registering a protest. You wouldn’t be registering anything. You’d be erasing yourself. You’d be disemboweling your own citizenship. You’d be tearing out the intestines of your patriotism and throwing them onto the barbecue of your apathy. In short: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. All right, but what if you don’t believe there’s a problem? One friend said to me, “I fully support the Barisan Nasional, and I know they will win, so why should I bother voting?” Well, obviously, if enough people think the way you do, Barisan won’t win in your constituency, and then you’ll feel pretty silly for having spent the day eating tiramisu, won’t you, you complacent middle-class tiramisu-eater? On the other side of the spectrum, someone said to me, “I support the Opposition, but there’s no way they will win, so why should I bother voting?” Well, that’s why they don’t win – because of stupid ideas like that. And even if you claim not to like a single one of the candidates in your constituency – which is entirely understandable, given that political parties of all sorts are occasionally obliged to distribute seats based on loyalty rather than competence, or indeed sentience – there will always be one candidate very slightly better than the others: the “least worst”. Please vote for the least worst. Doesn’t Malaysia deserve the least worst, at least? Happy voting, and good luck! - Star
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