PETALING JAYA: A lack of popular trust in the system will hold back wider use of postal voting in Malaysia, says a former Election Commission chairman.
Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, who now heads an election reform committee, said the majority of the rakyat put more trust in physically casting their vote at the ballot box, compared to postal voting.
He did not deny that more widespread use of postal voting could be done, but he said it needed to be improved including convincing the public that it is better and as transparent as physical voting.
“There needs to be a system that can be trusted, a system that is efficient and if we look at many foreign countries such as Canada, they all use postal voting, but everybody in the country believes in the system,” he said.
“If we introduce it here, many people will not trust it, and the elections will be disorderly.
“We should not simply introduce the system. Other people’s civic consciousness is different than ours. It’s not to say I disagree with postal voting but the less we do it the better,” Rashid said after a civic education event today.
Widespread postal voting was carried out for the US presidential election last month, but the deputy chairman of Malaysia’s Election Commission, Azmi Sharom, said Malaysia was not prepared to expand postal voting because the system was not made to be used on a larger scale.
There was also an element of public distrust of postal voting, especially as it has never been done openly before.