http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/elections.html
The Tuth About The Election System
Elections
In the absence of genuinely free and fair elections, the act of
voting becomes a treacherous impostor of democracy. In Singapore,
the Elections Department is under the purview of the Prime
Ministers Office. Because it conducts its business largely away
from public scrutiny, many are as convinced of its impartiality as
they would be the act of a ventriloquist over the radio.
For instance, the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee redraws the
boundaries and then submits its report to the cabinet for approval.
The opposition and the public are not consulted, and the report
bypasses parliament. Changes are announced only shortly before the
elections. As a result, constituencies that showed strong support
for the opposition party have undergone major surgery. These areas
have either been redistributed to other PAP strongholds or wholly
absorbed into GRCs.
Violations of the Parliamentary Elections Act (PEA) by the PAP are
never acted upon. In the 1997 elections, several PAP ministers
entered polling stations, which they clearly had no authority to
do. Under the PEA, no unauthorised persons are allowed to loiter
within 200 meters of any voting centre. Yet election officials did
not attempt to enforce the rule. Worse, the Attorney General
declined to prosecute, saying that the ministers were inside the
polling centreas opposed to loitering on the outsideand, hence,
not in breach of any regulation. Complaints and reports about
ballot papers being folded together (which should be impossible,
because each voter is required to fold his or her voting paper and
place it individually into the boxes), the number of ballot papers
exceeding the number of registered voters, ballots being sealed in
the boxes before polling commenced, ballot boxes not being sealed
in the presence of opposition candidates and their agents, and
ballot boxes taken to centres outside of the constituency for
counting all went unheeded.
The official campaign period is limited to eight days. The ruling
party meanwhile enjoys the adoration of the media it controls and
freely uses the publicity to introduce and generate support for its
candidates months in advance of the election. Under the British
system, the prime minister is empowered to select the election
date. In Singapore, the end of the year has been the period
favoured by the PAP for elections because of the monsoon rains,
which prevent voters from attending the rallies of opposition
parties. The government determines the time and the sites for
public rallies, which usually means that the designated spots are
remote and difficult to get to, with grounds that quickly turn into
muddy swamps after a downpour.
The GRC system is a monstrous affront to parliamentary
representation. Voters cannot choose the candidates they want. The
professed rationale for this system is to ensure that ethnic
minority communities are not underrepresented in parliament, since
each GRC team requires at least one candidate from the minority
groups. The PAP argues that the majority Chinese population would
be reluctant to elect a candidate not of the same race. Such a
principled endeavour would be praiseworthy if it were not for the
fact that Jeyaretnam, a minority himself, defeated Chinese PAP
candidates in 1981 and again in 1984. In fact, the percentage of
ethnic minority MPs declined relative to the population since the
1988 elections, when the scheme was first implemented. Add to this
the increasing number of NMPs, the reluctance of the government to
hold by-elections, and death of the one-person-one-vote system, and
parliamentary democracy in Singapore has become something of an
unpalatable joke.
One factor that makes Singaporeans so fearful of taking part in
elections is the use of libel laws by the PAP. The judiciary is
seen by many to be partial to the ruling party. Several opposition
leaders have been rendered bankrupts when they have been unable to
pay the millions of dollars in damages to the PAP plaintiffs.
Veteran oppositionist, Joshua B. Jeyaretnam, has paid more than a
million dollars to Lee Kuan Yew and other PAP litigants. A former
judge, Jeyaretnam had to sell his houses and almost all his
possessions to make good on the payments. In January 2001, he was
declared bankrupt because he could not pay the hundreds of
thousands of dollars he still owed his opponents. Under the law he
will lose his seat in parliament and be barred from future
elections.
Tang Liang Hong, a successful corporate lawyer and an opposition
candidate in the 1997 elections, was sued for defamation for
remarks he made about PAP leaders during a public rally. Following
the elections, Tang fled the country. His wifes passport was
quickly impounded and she was made a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
Their assets were seized. Months later, a high court judge awarded
the 11 PAP plaintiffs US$4.7 million, later reduced to US$2.1
million. Tang was subsequently declared bankrupt when he failed to
pay the money. He and his wife lost everything they owned in
Singapore. The story would have been less wretched had it ended
there. During his exile, the government charged him with 33 counts
of tax evasion. There is presently an outstanding warrant for his
arrest.
In 2001, Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong sued Dr Chee Soon Juan for
defamation for raising questions about Singapores secretive loan
to the Suharto regime in 1997 just before he was toppled. The
courts then refused to allow Dr Chee to engage foreign lawyers in
the form of Queens Counsels (QC), even though Dr Chee had
indicated that he could not find a local lawyer to represent him
and that Lee and Goh had engaged a Senior Counsel (Singapores
equivalent of the QC) to act for them. The case was subsequently
awarded to the plaintiffs in a summary judgment which meant that Dr
Chee was not given an open trial to defend himself and call for
witnesses. The plaintiffs were awarded $500,000 in damages.
This was not the first suit brought against Dr Chee. In 1993 when
he was sacked from the National University of Singapore and three
months after he joined the opposition and contested in an election,
Dr Chee was also sued for defamation by the head of the department,
who was a PAP MP, for disputing that his dismissal. The amount of
costs and damages awarded was approximately $400,000.
Such a scenario has prompted Amnesty International to remark:
Civil defamation suits are being misused by the Executive to
intimidate and deter those Singaporeans holding dissenting
views.
It is no wonder then that in its annual report Freedom House says
that, Citizens cannot democratically change their
government.
