After some back-and-forth, we have finally obtained some closure with the Australian High Commission in Canberra on the issue of absentee balloting.
It seems like in order to vote in this election, students should have registered for an absentee ballot before elections were announced.
Righto.
Anyway, some students in London and NY have reported success in obtaining Borang A from their various high commissions and embassies, which is the first step to absentee balloting, and I am hopeful that they at least will be able to have their votes count in this election.
The process as described to me by the chap at the Aus High Comm is this: 1) they distribute Borang A to interested parties (after filtering out those who are actually not elligible), 2) interested parties send Borang A back to SPR who will then remove your name from the polling station roll, 3) SPR mails the voter a ballot, 4) voter mails the ballot back to SPR before March 8th… i.e. it must REACH SPR before March 8th. SPR must remove your name from the polling station roll so that you can’t vote postally then fly back and vote in person again. This is why the High Comm says registration needed to have been done before elections were announced (and I personally suspect the cutoff may have actually been February 5th).
Not to discourage anyone from trying to vote, but actually from the explanation of the Aus High Comm… I wonder if in the end all those students in NY and London can even actually vote… we’ll have to wait and see. These registrations may actually be for the next elections. All these students better check their status the next time the rolls are gazetted; they may still be registered to vote as absentees, which means they won’t get to vote in person back in Malaysia, unless they explicitly “unregister” for postal voting. Whatever it is, anyone who is attempting to vote should document the process thoroughly and report back to whatever popular sites, such as the VotED Facecook group where there is some representation from BERSIH.
There is no reason this process could not be made a whole lot smoother. Why can’t the rolls be updated 1 week before polling? Are they sitting there with typewriters and liquid paper or what? This is our 12th GE and we still can’t run it properly?
[...] at the Australian High Commission in Canberra, about absentee voting, and it turns out we were too late to register for postal voting. At the time, the high comm couldn’t tell me when the actual deadline was, but I had guessed [...]