The voting process for GE2020 did not go as smoothly as the Elections Department would have liked.
Due to the addition of precautionary measures like hand-sanitising, polling stations looked like a newly-opened bubble tea store, with long, snaking queues.
ELD apologised on Polling Day (10 July) to voters for the inconvenience, and said it would conduct a thorough review of what went wrong.
A few days later, the department apologised again, this time to 13 voters on stay-home notice staying in hotels.
ELD inadvertently omitted their names from the list submitted by Marina Bay Sands to ELD on Polling Day, and so they couldn’t vote.
Now it turns out they weren’t the only ones.
Woman Made Police Report After She Couldn’t Vote on Polling Day
Polling Day was a frustrating day for 36-year-old Mdm Lum.
The woman tried to vote several times, but ended up marking her choice on a tendered ballot paper which would not be counted.
Despite this, the register reflected that she had already voted, so she decided to make a police report.
Based on how many police reports were lodged in the last week, I’m sure that was a difficult task as well.
In an interview with Lianhe Zaobao, Lum said she arrived at her designated polling station at Block 23A Ghim Moh Link at 12.30 pm.
Her problems started when she was unable to scan her identity card (IC) to register her attendance, as an error message kept popping up.
So an election official offered to enter Lum’s NRIC manually into the registration system, but that didn’t work either, as it said that Mdm Lum had already voted.
Lum said she hadn’t voted yet, and that she had never lost her card.
In response, an official allegedly asked her if she “really wanted to vote” before issuing a tendered ballot paper to her.
According to AsiaOne, tendered ballot papers are blue in colour and are issued to electors who want to cast their vote even after the Presiding Officer (PO) has informed them that they have already voted.
In other words, a vote on a tendered ballot paper doesn’t count.
However, Lum was only told this after she signed an Oath of Identity form and declared that she had not already voted.
What the heck was the point, then?
When Lum called ELD to provide feedback, an ELD employee advised her to make a police report.
She later returned to the polling station at 2pm and made another call to ELD at 5pm to validate her vote but to no avail.
ELD’s Response
Speaking to AsiaOne, ELD said that the mistake was due to “human error and miscommunication between the two election officials handling her registration”.
ELD explained that the PO was not able to register Lum’s NRIC as he had “not switched out of the wrong module of the e-Registration system,”.
This means that Lum’s NRIC was not registered to vote before she had actually cast her ballot, as she was told.
“The PO then escalated this to the Assistant Returning Officer (ARO). However, a miscommunication between the PO and ARO led the latter to interpret that Mdm Lum’s NRIC number had already been used to register for voting earlier in the day. This was then wrongly communicated to Mdm Lum”, ELD said.
ELD has reached out to Mdm Lum to apologise and will restore her name to the Registers of Electors without penalty.
Considering that this was only the second election since independence where all constituencies were contested, with around 2,565,000 voters, Mdm Lum and the other 13 Singaporeans must be wondering how they were so unlucky.
And on a side note, politicians have been talking about NCMP (Non-Constituency Member of Parliament) in recent days. So, what’s an NCMP? Do you know that it’s just like an MP but the allowance is much lower? Watch this video to find out more:
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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