Friday, August 01, 2008

One in four voters lost their rights to vote: Investigation

30 July 2008
By Ros Dina
Ka-set
Unofficial translation from French by Tola Ek
Click here to read the original article in French
Click here to read the original article in Khmer

On Tuesday 29 July, NICFEC, NDI (National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) and CAS (Center for Advanced Studies) issues the summary of an investigation conducted on Sunday 27 July, the date of the Cambodian general election, based on a sample of 378 polling stations. While the ballot organization was “globally good,” representatives of the three organizations said that, in some polling stations, almost one quarter of the voters lost their rights to vote.

At a technical level, the investigation conducted in these 378 polling stations “randomly selected” showed that almost all of them respected the election rules: the stations were placed in a neutral location, they had appropriate election materials, and they opened and closed at the schedule time.

Investigators noted some rare cases of “violence and intimidations” in 2.2% of the stations evaluated.

On the other hand, secret voting was not well assured: close to 14% of the stations investigated did not have appropriate voting booth to preserve the confidentiality of the votes.

Furthermore, investigators noted that, in 15.1% of the polling stations, election officials “did not accomplish their duty correctly and they tried to influence the votes.”

More alarming is the number of voters who, even though they had all the appropriate documents, lost their right to vote, Hean Sokhom, CAS president, underscored.

At the polling stations where at least 5 frauds took place, about 1 in 4 voters (24.9%) came to vote but couldn’t do it because his name did not show up on the voting lists.

Without extrapolating this issue to the national level, this percentage is only based on the polling stations where the sample was selected, and in which at least 5 people faced this type of problem. Hang Puthea, Nicfec executive director, said that he was “very concerned by this loss of the right to vote,” which “brings in a loss of confidence by the public in the election process.”

Finally, the same study highlighted the drop in the turnout rate: 75.1% versus 83.2% during the last general election.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually the cheaters has never win,
But for Hun Sen everything are possible although Hun Sen sold the Cambodian land to the foreign to invest or gave away land to Viet his master.
So one thing that we can fix ,we have to stand up by using wild wild west style, assassinating by using sniper technique ,for our Mother land we are all must to sacrify for the sake of the country.
We can do it

Anonymous said...

let us begin.

Anonymous said...

I call all foreign investors and international community to boycott and divestment in Cambodia until human rights and international law are respected.