KUALA LUMPUR: The Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) has identified 347 electoral offences committed by political parties contesting the 15th General Election in November last year.
According to Bersih's GE15 monitoring report released today, there were 10 types offenses committed, including bribery and buying votes, catering and offering gifts or products, as well as improper government influence.
"Other violations and offences include the employment of government assets; intimidation, harassment and violence; excessive spending; biased conduct by public officials; early vote and postal vote; polling day problems and voter registration problems," said Bersih's researcher Asraf Sharafi on a Facebook live stream today.
The report alleged that Barisan Nasional committed 44 offences, Pakatan Harapan committed 25, Perikatan Nasional committed 18, Parti Warisan committed three, Parti Bangsa Malaysia committed two, Gabungan Parti Sarawak committed six and Gabungan Rakyat Sabah committed 11.
An independent candidate was also alleged to commit an offence, while the perpetrators of other offenses could not be determined, he said.
Bersih concluded that Malaysian voters were still not confident in the Election Commision's handling of postal votes, due to various constraints and problems that arose during GE15.
"Among them are confusion regarding the registration to become a postal voter, problems with postal ballot envelopes — empty, wrong address, did not have the address of the returning officer (RO), and issues with serial numbers and Form 2.
"Besides that, there were cases where the ballot papers received belonged to other people, postal ballot envelopes arrived late resulting in votes not counted, postal ballot envelopes were not received and postal ballot envelopes that had to be quarantined in China," he said.
Other issues included the high cost of mailing postal ballots from the Middle East, as well as voters finding themselves registered as absentee voters and had to vote by post, but the postal ballot envelopes were never received.