13th General Elections - 5 May 2013

2013 is a special year.

It was the year that 2 of our children voted for the first time in the country's national elections.

With much debating and talking and arguing politics in the home (and many heated discussions) our 2 oldest children went to the ballot box for the first time. Even Amanda was involved in feeding us the latest news on Facebook on who said what, who did what even though she was the only member in the family who could not vote as yet. She was like a commentary on the latest news and updates that her friends posted on Facebook!

This was also the year that we decided to do something more than just pray. We have been praying for the past 5 years for this long-awaited event on May 5 2013. Now we wanted to get involved to be part of this historic occasion.

We signed up for Pemantau duties. Pemantau is an NGO comprising of Komas, Bersih and Mafrel. It is a citizen's initiative with the aim of mobilizing citizens to observe the elections process.

Among our duties were to be stationed at a particular school to observe and report on breaches of election rules such as phantom voters (before the elections all kinds of reports abounded of Bangladeshis going to vote), campaigning within a certain parameters of the polling stations, vote buying etc.

We had to attend a few briefings at the KLCAH on the duties of a Pemantau. We also had to sign a pledge of neutrality. There were a few hot seats to observe in KL - Cheras, Lembah Pantai, Titwangsa, Wangsa Maju among others.

We opted for the parliamentary hot seat of Titiwangsa to observe as they were short of people. Our coordinator was Dian who subsequently resigned. Alicia took over and we wholeheartedly communicated with her via whatsapp on where to go, what to do, getting our Pemantau kit, what to observe and report etc.

We were given a Pemantau vest, clipboard, several reports and questionnaire to complete. The reports were for nomination day, campaigning period and election day itself.

Alicia assigned us to be the team leader for Sek Desa Pandan. We had Fauzah, Fauziah, Affendy and Yuet Ching with us in the team. To ensure that we all had time to vote, we broke our team in 3 groups taking 2 hourly shift from 8 am till 5 pm. Affendy took the earliest shift, the 2 Malay ladies the second shift and Yuet Ching and ourselves took the last shift from 2 pm to 5 pm.

It was interesting to visit the BN operations room and the PAS operations room to pantau ("Pantau" is the BM word for observe). 

Note: The PAS candidate Zambry refused to shake my hand when he turned up at the school on election day....(I later learnt that PAS people do not shake ladies' hands....LOL...)

Tim and I did not have time to observe the campaigning/ceramahs but we made sure that we attended all the training sessions and also kept in touch with our team members who took time and effort to attend the various ceramahs. The 2 Malay ladies later filed reports of the various ceramahs they attended in Putrajaya.

May 5 2013 will be remembered as a wonderful day for our family. 

Early in the morning we ferried Adeline to her polling station at a community hall in Taman Muda. She took about 2 hours to finish her voting as they were many people lining up to vote.

We then drove to Section 17 to vote. Since our Uni days we had been registered voters in PJS and we opted not to change our polling stations. Again another hour or so of queuing. Finally we finished and took Adeline for breakfast at the best nasi lemak in town.

Then we drove back to Pandan Indah to take over the afternoon duties from Fauzah and Fauziah at the school in Desa Pandah. 

After a long day, we collected the reports from all our team members and made our last stop at KLCAH to deliver all the reports to Simon, our leader for the whole Pemantau Project.

It will certainly be a day to remember for us. Hopefully this entry in our blog will enable our children and grandchildren to always appreciate the democracy in our country and the peace that we enjoy.

May our children and grandchildren continue to exercise this precious right to vote and may they vote wisely for the candidates that will bring the most transformation and improvement to the various parliamentary and state constituencies.