Indelible ink? Questions arising from the recent election need to be addressed.

If an institution as important as the Election Commission does not enjoy the confidence of the people, then it needs to seriously and sincerely address this scepticism to be relevant.

LAST Sunday saw many people on social networks both celebrating the 13th Malaysian general elections and venting about it. If my mother were a Twitter user, she may have contributed to that conversation herself the week before.

My mother had been registered as a postal voter a few months ago. On the weekend of April 28, she travelled 500km to the Malaysian embassy in Paris to vote. After confirming she was correctly registered, she was given an envelope with her name on it which contained her ballot paper.

Except that the envelope was empty. There was no ballot paper. Even worse, she found out she couldn’t get a new one to vote with.

If that happened to me, I might have leaned over the table, clutched the officer by his lapels and shook him violently until some spare ballot paper magically fell out. It is to my mother’s credit that all she did in contrast was to register a complaint, make a report to the observers, and left the embassy without nary a hair out of place – hers or anybody else’s.

Unfortunately, despite the paperwork, she did not get to vote with the ballot paper assigned to her, or with a replacement.

In Malaysia on May 5, the complaints were of a different nature. There were many posts and tweets talking about delible indelible ink, phantom voters and blackouts that managed to multiply ballot boxes. I expect all these will be documented properly and forwarded to the correct authorities for further action.

Unfortunately, it seems that Malaysians cannot agree who the “proper authority” is. I saw on the social media that some Malaysians handled things their own way, not by approaching the relevant authorities, but by taking matters into their own hands.

People proudly boasted about how they stopped foreigners from voting, and how they managed to maintain the integrity of the elections by being vigilant. However, I think the right word was “vigilante” – a self-appointed mob that used force without acknowledging due process to get their objectives met.

There is something undeniably wrong about assaulting anybody, or demanding to see their IC and then taking it away from them, even if they are not a legitimate voter. Among the stories that came out were of a husband of a policewoman who was assaulted because the attackers suspected him of being a foreigner.

Hit first, and don’t bother to ask questions, really.

The justification by the mobs of their actions were simple – the existing institutions are already corrupt, so we need to do wrong ourselves to make things right. Yet, I believe there is a path less extreme than what they subscribed to. There may be good reasons not to trust existing institutions, but the solution is not anarchy.

It is to either fix what is broken, or support and build a new one that works. And how you overcome the obstacles will say so much about the kind of system you are trying to put in yourselves.

But a peaceful route is only possible if existing institutions recognise two things: that this lack of trust in them is a fundamental problem in developing a country well; and that a lowering of such a trust is not necessarily a negative thing.

A study published in the British Journal Of Social Psychology identified that there was a correlation between certain values and how strongly people trusted institutions. Specifically, they identified that those with high values of “tradition, conformity and security” would also have high trust in institutions.

However, Malaysia is a country undergoing growing pains. Its young citizens want to taste success for themselves, and they value independent thought and action, coupled with the understanding and appreciation of others. These three values of “hedonism, self-direction and universalism” are also those that strongly correlate with a distrust in institutions.

In other words, if you want a progressive society, there will naturally be greater scepticism of those in authority.

This is the challenge that existing institutions must take up. How do you make capable Malaysians who are critical of what you do a part of the solution?

I think the institutions need to reach out to those who are unhappy with them. They should be honest about mistakes made, and accept that constructive criticism is the correct way to move forward.

I am writing in abstract terms here, so let me put it in context. I don’t know what my mother thinks, but I believe that two weeks ago, the Electoral Commission (EC) failed her. Despite doing everything that was expected of her, she was refused the right to vote.

There are several ways the EC could have addressed this. For example, they could have assured my mother that hers was the only case where a ballot paper went missing, and that they would be more careful in the future.

They could also have argued my mum’s vote eventually didn’t matter anyway, since in her constituency the winning majority was more than 10,000 votes. But neither restores my trust in them. Everybody makes mistakes; it’s what you do after that that makes the difference.

For me, I would be looking for an explanation of how this could have occurred in the first place, and how often it could happen. Then they need to put in new processes: one to further mitigate the risk of losing the ballot paper in the first place, and another one to enable a person to still cast their vote even if the ballot paper has gone missing.

It still doesn’t right the wrong that was done, but it would make it less likely to happen to somebody else in the future.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Speak to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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