This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 4, 2018 - June 10, 2018
WHEN a wave of volunteers in Selangor and Johor signed up to help in the 14th general election, it was a sign to Invoke Malaysia that something was afoot.
As early as December last year, the organisation was confident the Pakatan Harapan coalition could bring Barisan Nasional’s 61-year rule to an end, as its surveys, voter canvassing and big data analytics indicated support for Umno had slipped to as low as 28% from 45% a few months before.
But the sheer number of volunteers signing up to help in the PH campaign, particularly as polling and counting agents (PACAs), supported Invoke’s conviction that a major upset was at hand.
Its founder Rafizi Ramli said Selangor was the first to see “a high number of volunteers”, followed by Johor — the birthplace of BN lynchpin Umno, and the state PH targeted to make major inroads to realise its aim of defeating BN.
“The surge of volunteers reflected our polling figures — that our polling and big data analytics were right,” he said.
To prevent electoral fraud, Invoke — an outfit established to bring together expertise in modern campaign techniques and driven by volunteerism — had aimed to register some 40,000 PACAs to place in the 30 most marginal parliamentary seats.
According to Rafizi, the surge of volunteers was especially pronounced from January onwards, with 23,000 PACAs signing up over the four-month period to April. At the same time, volunteers were also registering with other organisations and PH’s coalition partners to help their candidates.
Because the Election Commission said it was still in the process of gathering information, it is unclear how many PACAs were involved in GE14. Even 2013 figures are not available as the commission had not collected such information, according to its head of corporate communications Mohd Sabri Abdullah.
Ahead of GE14, however, EC chairman Mohd Hashim Abdullah estimated a total of 116,388 PACAs could be involved if all parties and candidates appointed their respective agents for the 8,971 polling centres and 29,097 polling streams.
A record number of candidates contested in GE14, with the 222 parliamentary seats up for grabs attracting 687 hopefuls. For the 505 state seats (excluding Sarawak) there were another 1,646 aspirants.
While a number of organisations and political parties mobilised volunteers to assist in the “mother of all elections”, Invoke was arguably the most successful, prompting Rafizi to describe the movement as “the largest election volunteer organisation of its kind” in Southeast Asia.
His contention aside, electoral adviser Joanne Cheah tells The Edge that the recruitment, training and mobilisation of tens of thousands of PACAs in GE14 is “extraordinary in the global electoral context”.
Having assisted in electoral reforms and elections in a number of troubled hot spots, including Pakistan and Somalia, she said the initiative to register, train and mobilise volunteers — many of whom were previously apathetic — to safeguard the polling process was “beyond impressive”.
Even more astonishing to many, Malaysia is now being held as a beacon of democracy in the region, following a peaceful transition of government after 61 years of consecutive BN rule and finally establishing a two-party political system in the country.
Tindak Malaysia was one of the earliest groups to push for change through voter education and electoral reforms.
Its founder P Y Wong said that since 2011, the electoral reform movement has trained “thousands based on the law” so they can better safeguard the election process, rather than remain at the mercy of the authorities.
“We put our training material online for people to use. Others downloaded it and trained more people,” said Wong, who leads a mixed group of fewer than 10 members whose main focus is PACA training, electoral mapping and reforms.
“We are just happy to be part of it [change],” he said, but he is adamant about the need for a royal commission of inquiry into the EC’s conduct in the election process. “The root of corruption is the electoral system and the EC is a very big partner to it.”
The May 9 polls had become all the more crucial because of what was at stake — for former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, because of his alleged role in state-owned 1Malaysia Development Bhd’s global financial scandals, and for his successor Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, 92, who helped put him in power but then became so disgusted at his governance he felt compelled to unseat him.
Ahead of the polls, the EC’s egregious redelineation of electoral boundaries became a major point of contention. Bersih, the coalition for clean and fair elections, pointed to malapportionment and gerrymandering of a number of constituencies — often along racial lines — which transformed a number of urban seats into super constituencies, further devaluing urban votes.
The urban parliamentary seat of Bangi in Selangor, for instance, was enlarged to comprise 179,000 voters, compared with the 20,000 of Igan, in rural Sarawak. The latter is less than a third the average constituency of 67,000 voters.
“PH seats were malapportioned to bigger sizes and BN seats were made smaller by a factor of two to four,” said Bersih’s acting chairman Shahrul Aman Mohd Saari in a statement after GE14, noting parliamentary seats won by PH had an average of 79,000 voters while BN seats averaged 45,000.
The commission also disallowed the country’s human rights commission, Suhakam, to observe polling, while its selection of Indonesia, Thailand, Maldives, Timor Leste, Cambodia, Krygyzstan and Azerbaijan as international election observers raised eyebrows.
Bersih was of the view that PH triumphed despite an election rigged against it in nearly every aspect by the EC, which also opted to hold the polls on a Wednesday rather than the customary weekend.
“This campaign of collusion was evident throughout the whole electoral process, from the redrawing of election boundaries to mismanagement of overseas postal votes,” Shahrul said, pointing as well to ad hoc rule changes during the campaign period.
Bersih has called on the EC’s seven commissioners to resign, although the EC — now slated to be reformed under the new administration — maintains it was not biased towards BN.
Ahead of the election, chairman Mohd Hashim had asserted that parties had the right to appoint polling agents to protect their interests. “Every party is given the opportunity to monitor the voting process at every voting stream by appointing their agents,” he stressed.
Najib also dismissed criticism that the election system was compromised because PACAs could observe the polling process from beginning to end, he pointed out. “That’s their role in ensuring the transparency of the election process,” he wrote in his blog a day before D-Day.
Spurred by the authorities’ challenge, many took to helping out, even in the less marginal seats.
Her long background in non-governmental organisations convinced former Bersih chairman Maria Chin Abdullah, who contested in the Petaling Jaya parliamentary seat after a stint in jail under an anti-terrorism charge, that she could better effect change as a lawmaker. She saw over a thousand people register to help, with about 650 signing up as PACAs.
“People from all walks of life are coming forward to help out in the service centres or to be volunteers,” she told news portal FMT ahead of the poll.
Whether it was anger at the electoral manipulation or frustration at the large-scale corruption in the country, volunteers co-opted family, friends, and colleagues.
D Maheswary brought two relatives, Sangeetha and Thanalachumi, when she registered to help while Gayle Yeoh came with her husband in tow.
A second-time voter, Yeoh said she had been motivated to “contribute back something”.
“I thought I could do more than just vote. After all, it’s only once in five years,” said the public relations executive.
As he had registered too late to vote, multimedia artist David Cheah felt he had to make up for not voting by helping out.
Angeline Ruby pushed staff at her PR and event management agency who had not registered to vote to sign on as PACAs. “Since Wednesday was a public holiday I decided they should help out if they were not going to vote!”
“I am unashamed to claim we operate downliners. We were constantly drumming in the message that people must bring as many others as possible,” Rafizi said of the multilevel marketing strategy, which achieved more than Invoke had set out to do.
“I wanted to make Malaysians understand that they have a role to play because they are the biggest stakeholders in this. And they don’t have to be part of a political party to be a part of change.”
And perhaps even more important than the election outcome, was how the PACA and volunteer initiative helped “remove some of the defeatism about elections”, he observed.
Better coordination in GE14 also saw Bersih approach the National Patriots Association, an organisation of military and police veterans, for assistance to reach out to former servicemen and current security forces personnel. At the same time, Invoke asked Patriot to help enlist sufficient PACAs in military camps and other security installations, Patriot’s public relations officer Wong Ang Peng wrote recently in an opinion piece.
Through the deployment of technology and the “right emotive messages”, Invoke’s targeted messaging proved extremely effective to the point that what was impactful about the PACA initiative was not that PH won, Rafizi says, “but that more people were educated about elections and their rights”.
An engineer by training but chartered accountant by profession, Rafizi — a vice-president of Parti Keadilan Rakyat — established Invoke two years ago with the aim of toppling BN. A former lawmaker, he did not contest in GE14 as he was disqualified because of a 30-month jail sentence imposed by the sessions court in February, after he was found guilty of leaking confidential banking details of the National Feedlot Corporation in 2012 as part of a corruption exposé.
Under a previous alliance, which included the Islamist party PAS, Pakatan Rakyat won 89 out of a total 222 parliamentary seats in GE13. To have a chance at succeeding, the coalition would have to defend most of the seats won plus capture a sizeable number of the 40-plus so-called marginal parliamentary seats.
“But I knew if we were to do a general campaign without focusing on marginal seats, we would not win,” he said of the initiative to place PACAs to safeguard the sanctity of the voting process and to ensure there would not be any fudging of results.
However, he also realised it would be difficult to mobilise the public through his party or coalition.
“The only way to do it was via an independent non-partisan movement,” he said of the initiative, which was aided by Andrew Claster, the deputy chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Rafizi said Claster was persistent about sharing his expertise when the Malaysians initially ignored his requests to meet because they thought they could not afford his fees.
Compared with the tens of millions of ringgit BN reportedly splurged on campaigns — including social media programmes — to remain in power, Invoke only spent some RM11.2 million over the past two years.
The funds were used to finance the campaigns of 44 parliamentary candidates and 60 candidates in state seats. Invoke claims it was successful in 42 out of 44 parliamentary seats that received its assistance, either at the parliamentary level or at least one state seat in the parliamentary district.
To qualify for assistance, candidates were required to declare their assets and to sign a contract that they would pay RM20 million to a public fund if they switched parties after winning.
Owing to a larger-than-expected 82.32% voter turnout and a backlash against BN across ethnic lines, PH won 121 parliamentary seats on May 9. It also clinched the key state of Johor when it bagged 36 out of the 56 seats, as well as Perak, Kedah, Negeri Sembilan, Melaka, and Sabah, in addition to holding on to Selangor and Penang.
“In this election, the effect of the redelineation was nullified due to a Malaysian tsunami that swept the country from Perlis to Sabah,” said Tindak Malaysia in a Facebook posting a week after the election.
“In this celebratory atmosphere, however, it is equally important to keep our eyes on the prize: institutional reform — especially reform of our electoral system.”
Pauline Ng is a contributing editor at The Edge Malaysia
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