There are two troubling aspects about Mr Chan Chun Sing’s reply in Parliament yesterday to Mr Pritam Singh’s question on the empty ballot boxes found in a school two years after the 2011 presidential election.
The first obvious question is why was he replying on behalf of the Prime Minister. The question was specifically directed at the PM as the Elections Department comes under the PMO. The PM should be the one answering to Parliament unless he was physically unwell or was otherwise engaged in critical national matters on the day. But this was not the case as he was seen in Parliament in good spirit celebrating his father’s 90th birthday.
It was a weighty matter deserving a reply from the minister directly in charge of the Elections Department. Was he belittling the issue and in so doing showed disrespect to Parliament? Why? Surely he was fully capable of tackling any follow-up questions? If indeed he was indisposed or unable to reply personally, shouldn’t he delegate the job to one of the three ministers in the PMO rather than to a minister for social and family development, a portfolio that by no stretch of the imagination, is even remotely concerned with the election machinery?
The second troubling aspect was the minister’s assertion that the abandoned empty ballot boxes was “not a lapse”. A lapse is a failure to maintain a standard procedure and the Elections Department in its press statement dated 30 August 2013, set out what this procedure was for empty ballot boxes, namely, that “They are supposed to have been collected by the Elections Department’s contractor, along with other discarded items, from the counting centres for general disposal.”
Clearly there was a deviation from prescribed practice when the empty ballot boxes were not collected and disposed of. Although the task was outsourced to a contractor, there must be an Elections Department representative who supervised or oversaw the process. In fact, there was a senior officer or supervisor at every polling station and counting centre to account for the boxes. The Elections Department must have felt that something was amiss or it would not have taken the serious step of filing a police report to investigate this matter. Have the police completed their investigation and if so, has the minister told us the full facts of the investigation?
The PM’s reply delivered on his behalf by Mr Chan, has failed to assuage the concerns of members of the public. The control and management of ballots and ballot boxes is crucial in the entire polling process. To dismiss the discovery of unaccounted for empty ballot boxes as not a lapse is to trivialize the requirement ensuring a safe and sound polling process that must enjoy the highest level of public confidence and faith.
Tan Jee Say
* Jee Say was a candidate in the 2011 Presidential Election. This article first appeared on his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/TanJeeSay