The Day I was a Polling Agent - Part 1

….Part 1 – “Be prepared for the battle”

I was at the office on the day Parliament was dissolved. Shortly after the announcement, an SMS from a fellow party worker arrived on my phone.”Parliament has been dissolved. Be prepared for the battle”, it said. Before that members of our party in the residential area where I live had been mobilised to prepare ourselves for the imminent announcement of the 12th General Election. Pak Lah had been hinting at it for some time and everybody was expecting he would announce it before April. We knew he wanted to deny Anwar the right to contest and we also knew he could not wait to raise fuel price after getting new mandate.

The next day the much awaited date was announced by the Election Commission. Nomination day was 24th February and Polling day was 8th March. There was to be 13 days of campaigning. Thirteen days of juggling between working in the office during the day and climbing trees to hang posters and banners at night. I tried to contribute in whatever capacity I could. I did not think we would win big but it was fun to be at the Bilik Gerakan every night, putting up posters, distributing campaign materials, watching VCD of ceramah projected onto the big screen over the roadside, and simply talking politics into the early morning when our work for the night was done. The big white screen used for the VCD screening reminded me of the 1970’s when Ministry of Information van would go to villages, put up an impromptu cinema in the village field, play the Hindi blockbuster “An Evening in Paris” and stop the show to talk about how to prevent cholera epidemic when the hero was about to give the villain a good bashing. Campaigning on TV had started way before the official campaign period and nobody gave a damn anymore what came on, as the overdose of government propaganda began to cause numbness on the people.

I forced myself up early on the nomination day even though I had slept around 3 o’clock the night before. It was Sunday and the stadium in our area was used as the nomination centre. I joined thousands of people from both sides marching towards the stadium around 7.30 AM. Calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Hidup BN’ were heard from across the stadium with each side trying to outscream the other. One side with green flags chanting the takbir and the other side waving blue flags singing ‘Inilah Barisan Kita’. The only barriers separating them were about a hundred meters of green grass and rows of policemen in blue uniforms standing guard. Each side was ready for the battle and the battle cry filled the otherwise peaceful morning air.

At 9 AM, nomination was opened and only candidates and their seconders were allowed to see the EC officers. It closed an hour later and from 10 AM to 11 AM the session was opened for objection. We waited on the field with hope and nervousness. We knew we were up against the other side who would try to find any mistake in the form to disqualify our candidate by any means. Our worries were not at all unfounded. There was last minute ruling handed down by the EC that looked like sabotage and the candidates on our side were not taking any chances. They complied with every single ruling made by the EC for they fear being disqualified. The EC head had been under fire for making a U-turn on mandatory Inland Revenue stamping of nomination forms. Initially, it was announced that there was to be strict enforcement of the mandatory stamping. The announcement itself was given at 3 PM on Thursday. This caused a lot of inconvenience to the candidates in Kelantan and Terengganu as they only had a few hours to do the stamping before close of business for weekends on Friday and Saturday. There would be no time on Sunday because nomination would start at 9 AM and close at 10 AM. Some of them had to fly to KL on Friday to get their forms stamped just so that they were not disqualified on technicality. But at the last minute, the ruling was cancelled for no reason. We learnt later that many BN candidates in Johor did not manage to get the Inland Revenue stamps and if the ruling was strictly imposed the Opposition would have won the state of Johor uncontested. That perfectly explained the last minute about-turn by the EC.

By noon on Sunday the 24th, the names of qualified candidates were announced. There was a sigh of relief from both sides as none of the candidates was disqualified. They were to fight as gentlemen.