A few days ago, I spoke to someone 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 that it was Feb 5th, the day the rolls were last gazetted. However, now I have received a written response from the high commission, and the news is a bit perplexing.
According to the email I received, the deadline to register for postal voting was last October. This is consistent with information shared by someone from Germany on polytikus.com:
“Yen wrote that the Malaysian Embassy in Berlin no longer accept registration for postal voters since Oct 2007. Interesting, they predicted the elections!”
First of all, I’m not sure why some embassies and consulates were still handing out the Borang A when some weren’t; did they simply not know what they were doing? Or were registrations still actually open, and in fact Canberra and Berlin screwed up? In any case, what was the justification for the Oct 2007 deadline that was adopted by Berlin and is being adopted retroactively by Canberra? Where did this deadline come from? What was it’s rationale? Why stop registering postal voters in October when technically elections are not due until 2009?
