CAMBODIA’S PEACEFUL AND CROOKED COMMUNE ELECTIONS

SRP MP Mu Sochua campaigning during the commune election (Photo:Philip Skoczkowski)

VIOLENCE GIVES WAY TO DISENFRANCHISEMENT, IMPERSONATION IN JUNE 3 POLL

The Cambodia Daily - Monday, June 11, 2012
By Mu Sochua

More sophisticated election manipulation techniques meant the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) could afford to reduce the level of political violence, while ensuring victory before voting day even arrived. These techniques, used on an unprecedented scale in June 3 commune elections, are disenfranchisement, to reduce votes for the opposition, and impersonation, to inflate votes for the ruling party. The tools used are non-existent ghost voters and fraudulent voter identification documents. The elections were even more unreal as voter turnout dropped from more than 80% previously to a historic low of 60%.

Yet, the CPP was unable to prevent a shift in the balance of power in favor of the democratic opposition represented by the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP). This resulted from the collapse of CPP’s two docile “royalist” allies: Funcinpec (FUN) and the Norodom Ranariddh Party (NRP).

Compared with results from previous local elections in 2007, the CPP and its two allies lost 295 commune councilor positions to the two democratic opposition parties. The latter now control at least 125 communes compared with 28 in 2007. This is based on the composition of commune councils where the combined opposition controls a majority of votes, regardless of the political affiliation of the commune chief.

With 3.64 million votes, the CPP increased its share of the popular vote from 58.1 percent at the last national assembly elections in 2008, to 62 percent. This resulted mainly from voter impersonation on an unprecedented scale. In the absence of impersonation, ballot tampering, intimidation and vote buying, the CPP would have hit a ceiling at about 2.5 million votes, or 40 percent, similar to what they obtained at the U.N.-organized national assembly elections in 1993.

How Ghost Voters Helped The CPP Win The Election

September 22, 2008
Source: SRP

HOW GHOST VOTERS HELPED THE CPP WIN THE ELECTION

In 2007 and 2008, under the pretext of "cleaning up" voter lists, the National Election Committee (NEC), which is controlled by the CPP, deliberately did the opposite of what it should have done: the NEC deleted names that should have remained on the lists and kept names that should have been deleted. The NEC deleted hundreds of thousands of names of bona fide voters, known to be unfavorable to the CPP, and kept hundreds of thousands of names of ghost voters in order to build up a reserve of fraudulent votes for the CPP. The outcome was that hundreds of thousands of persons without the right to vote (citizens not registered on the lists of the residential commune, or underage, or foreigners) were able to vote by using forged voter identification documents (called 1018 Forms) which were methodically provided to them by local authorities controlled by the CPP by using names of these ghost voters. The NEC has in fact killed three birds with one stone: it has succeeded in cleverly reducing the opposition's votes to a large extent, fraudulently inflated the CPP's votes to the same extent, and maintained a decent rate of "voter" turnout.

The 1018 Form is a special voter identification document purportedly issued by local authorities for those who don't have any proper ID document. It is actually used by the holder as a voter card valid only in his/her commune of residence. It was the source of a massive election fraud at the July 27, 2008 poll.

To see a blank 1018 Form followed by an example of forgery using a ghost's identity with English translation, please click at http://tinyurl.com/4b3jyb

Evidence of fraud

The following are examples of pre-signed and pre-stamped empty 1018 Forms issued by CPP commune chiefs all over Cambodia . The documents were prepared in advance in order to be fraudulently filled out by CPP local authorities by using ghost voters' names and immediately given to illegitimate voters on Voting Day. Please click at http://tinyurl.com/5v9xbe

From countless communes we have collected bunches of such pre-signed and pre-stamped empty 1018 Forms, which shows the general pattern of a massive election fraud. As a matter of fact, forged 1018 Forms were methodically and systematically issued throughout the country in order to substantially inflate the number of votes for the CPP.

To see a sample of some 200 ready-to-be-used 1018 Forms collected from all parts of Cambodia , which were fraudulently filled out using ghost voters' names, please click at http://tinyurl.com/6cmh94

Each case shows the real identity of an illegitimate voter as shown in his/her ID card as well as the fake identity given to him/her as shown on the forged 1018 Form. Both documents show the same photo of the same person.

Most of those forged documents were filled out with a lot of breathtaking mistakes such as in the case presented at http://tinyurl.com/57vdu8

We will present many more cases like that in the coming days.

An independent report on the issue of the 1018 Form can be read at http://tinyurl.com/5eo33w

The issuing of 1018 Forms by the CPP authorities did have a big impact on the election results. As few as five forged 1018 Forms per polling station unfairly deprived the Opposition of one National Assembly seat as shown at http://tinyurl.com/4275dz

For more evidence of election rigging nationwide by the CPP-controlled National Election Committee, please click at http://tinyurl.com/4eegak

SRP Cabinet

Sacrava's Political Cartoon: Form 1018, Ghost & Xmer Voters

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)