GE15: Election date can be used by some parties to postpone court cases – Fahmi Fadzil

SHAH ALAM – Some parties or politicians with pending court cases may want to utilise the recently announced polling date as an avenue to postpone their trials, says Lembah Pantai MP Fahmi Fadzil.

Fahmi said this in a response to Sinar Daily’s question about his thoughts on the recently announced polling day made by the Election Commission (EC) in regards to the 15th General Election.

“I can imagine that some people will want to move their court cases to ensure that it will happen after the elections.

“They'll give many excuses, so to me, it’s quite interesting dates,” he said when met at PPR Bazaria at Lembah Pantai today.

For him, it was hard to say whether Nov 19 was a good or bad date for GE15 especially as the risk of monsoon was still looming over our heads.

He said the most important thing at the moment was for the EC to come up with plans and strategies to prepare against the flood.

His expectation from the EC’s announcement of the polling dates was they should also be using this opportunity to announce standard operating procedures (SOPs) immediately and plans to conduct elections during the flooding season.

He took Kampung Pasir Baru in Puchong - one of the flooding hot spots in Selangor - as an example and said if floods were to happen again, they would lose two polling stations.

He also worried that flooding would cause more confusion to voters on election day as they might not know if they needed to be moved to another polling station.

“So, what's going to happen to these six or seven thousand voters? Are they going to move to a different polling station?

"How would they know they have to go to those polling stations? Will this cause more confusion to voters on election day?” he said.

He said at the moment, he could not see any plans made by the EC and if no plans were made, it would seem as if EC had only planned to fail.

“To me, the failure to plan is you are planning to fail. If you are planning to fail, that means you are doing it purposely,” he said.

He also said that he would not want to make these allegations but to him, the EC chairman would be the one responsible if the voters did not know where to go during election day due to the floods.

The EC had set Nov 19 to be the long-anticipated date of GE15.