Singapore — Workers’ Party politician Yee Jenn Jong said in a Facebook post on Friday (Oct 9) that he has met “so many current and former civil servants” who have voted against the People’s Action Party (PAP) and have told him so.
Mr Yee, who was Non-constituency Member of Parliament from 2011 to 2015, said this in the context of whether one’s vote is secret.
His comments followed a Facebook post the same day by WP leader Pritam Singh to address the concern of “a very small section of voters” who “seem to think that their votes are not a secret”. It was written after President Halimah Yacob issued an order to open a sealed ballot box from this year’s General Election for the retrieval of a document that had been inadvertently sealed in it.
In his post, Mr Singh walked readers through the process of how ballots are destroyed, saying that all political parties that contest elections are “present to enter the Supreme Court vault to ensure no ballot boxes have been tampered with before escorting these boxes to the Tuas incineration plant”.
Mr Yee added to Mr Singh’s post to say that, while he has met many who have told them they did not vote for the PAP, nothing had happened to these people.
https://www.facebook.com/yeejj.wp/posts/3388927871174963
He wrote first that, with the large numbers of Singaporeans who did not vote for the PAP in elections, a figure sometimes higher than 40 per cent, even if the Government knew who these individuals are: “What are they going to do with such a large number of Singaporeans exercising their democratic choice to vote against the PAP?”
Votes are secret, he said, unless voters reveal who they vote for. He then proceeded to say that he had voted for himself in the past three elections. As for the people who have disclosed to him whom they have voted for: “Nothing has happened to them.”
In the same way, he added, nothing happened to those in the precincts that voted for him in the 2011 GE, wherein he won in nearly the same number of precincts as the PAP’s Charles Chong.
Mr Yee also wrote that there would be “no way” that the Government would open so many boxes and keep this a secret. “There are over 2 million votes to be matched in each of the recent GE — no way to do it secretly!”
He then added that “so many” past and present civil servants told him that they voted against the PAP. “Many civil servants do their duties as required by their job but their vote is not necessarily with the government. I even had an election official coming up to me after the counting on polling day to say he voted for me in Marine Parade GRC but was sorry to see that our team did not win. I know of many civil servants who are or were in high ranking positions despite of how they had voted.”
And the former NCMP himself has been present twice when the vault has been opened to destroy the sealed ballot boxes, and saw his signature on the seal of the boxes, “all still intact, unopened after 6 months”. /TISG
Read also: Why WP’s Yee Jenn Jong filed adjournment motion at last moment when he was NCMP
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