One of the reforms that Pakatan Harapan will focus on once given the opportunity to govern is to come up with a proper mechanism for the Election Commission (EC) to allow Sarawakians and Sabahans residing in Peninsular Malaysia or vice versa to vote without having to travel all the way home to vote.
Such could be in the form of either absentee voting, advance voting or even postal voting to remove hurdles for such voters to be part of the electoral process.
This will be part of the reforms in our upcoming manifesto to address the failures of the current government to come up with the necessary electoral reforms to facilitate more participation and ensure that the right to vote is merely exclusive for the rich or those that can afford to travel back.
This is even more real for students or even young adults who have little choice but to travel far from their hometown to study or work, but have insufficient funds to travel back just to vote.
This is something that I have been personally pushing for in Parliament since I was elected in 2018. In 2019 I had a meeting with the then EC Chairman Azhar Harun who was receptive of the idea and was studying the mechanism to do it.
I even tabled an emergency motion in Parliament in 2021 to compel the EC to implement such reforms to provide a safer environment for voters to vote during a pandemic
Such mechanism has to be properly fine tuned, including making the necessary procedural changes to even extend the categories for “advanced voting” to include Sabahan and Sarawakians residing in Peninsular Malaysia or vice versa.
While postal voting may be one a solution for this and probably easier to implement, but we cannot deny that there are questions of integrity and public trust issues on this method as it may be more vulnerable to abuse.
That is why one of the alternatives is to allow advance voting system to be expanded to these segment of voters so that they can vote at specific advance voting places whether in each state of major states just like how the army and police do their voting.
In order for that to happen, these segment of voters must register to qualify for out of region voters and be in the EC system, then on the designated voting day, walk into advanced voting station, cast their vote in a normal way with presence of independent observers & polling agents(PACAs).
The ballot boxes then to be sealed and secured under lock and key and be kept under a 24-hour CCTV surveillance, possibly livestreamed before. The ballot boxes are then transferred to the respective state/constituency under proper security until polling day where it be counted.
This could be one of the alternatives that the Pakatan Harapan will explore to properly address this issue so that the EC can reform and innovate so that we can encourage more voter participation, especially for voters from both Sarawak and Sabah on top of providing a safer voting environment even during a pandemic.