January 19, 2014 byletters2pppapers
Several of the NGOs that formed the Electoral
Reform Alliance spent a large part of the first half of last year claiming that
the process and result of registering voters are defective and that this
disadvantages the opposition. So it is not surprising that this is a major
theme in the ERA report released in early December.
A problem of credibility arises because these
claims are wildly different from each other.
The 30 October Cambodia Daily carried an
interview with Laura Thornton, the Cambodia country director of the National
Democratic Institute, a pretend NGO (it is funded almost entirely by the US
government) that has a record of supporting conservative forces without regard
for their attitude to democracy. The NDI appears as the directing force of the
ERA.
The purpose of the interview was to publicise a
survey Thornton said had been conducted by the Center for Advanced Studies.*
According to Thornton, the survey found that “29.5 percent of citizens
attempted to vote on election day, but were unable to”.
This is quite an astounding – not to say absurd –
figure. It implies that 2.86 million people (29.5% of 9.68 million registered
voters; the number would be even larger if it included people who thought they
were registered but were not) turned up at the polls (“attempted to vote”) on
28 July and were turned away. It equally implies that NGO and CNRP observers at
polling stations didn’t notice nearly a third of would-be voters being refused.
It is not surprising that this “survey” seems never to have been publicly
released, although the ERA report authors are still happy to cite unnamed CAS
reports as support for their claims.
A quite different figure comes from Theary C.
Seng, the founding president of Civicus Cambodia. Civicus’ website describes
the organisation as “nonpartisan”, although Theary Seng publicly boasts of
campaigning for Sam Rainsy ever since 1998 (“Cambodia’s tipping point”, Phnom
Penh Post, 16 August 2013). She says that “fifteen per cent of voters –
about 1.2 to 1.3 million of 9.6 million registered voters” were unable to vote
– about half the CAS figure.
Seng cites as the source for this a National
Democratic Institute-written document. In fact, this document, whose full name
is “Report on the Voter Registry Audit (VRA) in Cambodia 2013”, says nothing
about how many registered voters were unable to vote – it could hardly have
done so, since it was produced in March 2013, well before the election. And
there is nothing in it that I can find that justifies Seng’s numbers, even if
her clumsy arithmetic is corrected (1.2 to 1.3 million is 12.5% to 13.5% of 9.6
million, not 15%).
The NDI report says that the VRA could not find
the names of 10.8% of the people who said they were registered. However, after
further investigation, this figure declined to 8.8%. The NDI report of the
audit, written before the correction, said that the margin of error was
2.0-3.5%. An error of 2% out of 10.8% is an error of 18.5%.
So far, from the critics of the NEC, who all
agree with each other that there is something fishy about the voter
registration, the number of Cambodians deprived of their vote has declined from
28.5% to 15% (or 13%) to 8.8%. But there is more still to come.
The ERA report’s authors don’t give a specific
figure, but they present a chart, “Voters with identification whose names were
not on the voter list”, which indicates a range: the percentage of polling
stations in which there were no, few, some or many instances of names not on
the list (Figure 9). The chart is based on a survey conducted by Transparency
International Cambodia (TIC) and, according to the ERA report’s authors,
“provides statistically meaningful information on the conduct of voting and
counting … with a high degree of accuracy”.
According to the chart, in 40% of polling
stations, there were no instances of intending voters whose names were not on
the voter list. Furthermore, there were no stations at which “many” (more than
50) such instances occurred. At 52% of stations, there were from 1 to 10 cases,
and at 8%, there were 11 to 50 cases. The survey’s “high degree of accuracy”
thus allows us to calculate national minimum and maximum figures for how many
would-be voters’ names were not found on election day. Since there were 19,009
polling stations, the minimum would be 19,009 times 52% plus 19,009 times 8%
times 11, while the maximum would be 19,009 times 52% times 10 plus 19,009
times 8% times 50. These figures, respectively, come to 26,613 and 174,883.
These are 0.27% and 1.8% of the number of registered voters. The midpoint
between the minimum and maximum, a bit less than 101,000, would represent 1.0%
of registered voters, less than one-eighth of the figure in the NDI report’s
VRA.
There was another survey, as the ERA report
notes: “The NGO Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (NGO-CEDAW) deployed 730 election observers to 656
polling stations across the country, who recorded similar findings. A total of
1,772 instances were reported of eligible citizens unable to find their names
on the voter registry.” That is an average of 2.7 cases per polling station.
Applying that figure to the 19,009 stations gives a national total of 51,324,
or a bit over one-half of 1% of registered voters.
But there is no need to rely on surveys. COMFREL
had observers at all polling stations. The ERA report tells us what they saw:
“COMFREL election day monitors observed at least 9,052 cases of citizens unable
to vote because they could not find their names on the voter list.” That is,
COMFREL observers saw 9,052 such cases throughout the entire country. The “at
least” is meant to suggest that there might have been more, but if there were
any COMFREL observers who saw but didn’t note citizens who couldn’t find their
names on the voter list, they were not doing their job.
And there you have it: the self-appointed “monitors”
of Cambodia’s elections are agreed that the number of eligible voters whose
names were not on the list was nearly 3 million, and also 1.2-1.3 million and
1.045 million (8.8% of 9.68 million) and 101,000 and 51,000 and 9,000. Aren’t
Cambodians lucky to have such experts to tell the government and the NEC how to
run elections!
* The ERA report calls it by the same name, but
the organisation’s website gives the name as Center for Advanced Study.
By Allen Myers