SRP files criminal lawsuits against CPP commune chiefs for forgery linked with election fraud

SRP FILES CRIMINAL LAWSUITS AGAINST CPP COMMUNE CHIEFS
FOR FORGERY LINKED WITH ELECTION FRAUD

In the days preceding July 27, 2008 and on Voting Day itself, CPP local authorities issued a large number of 1018 Forms to those potential voters who had allegedly lost their National Identity Cards in order for them to be still allowed to cast their ballot. The 1018 Form is a substitute ID document for those who don't have the standardized National Identity Card nor any other valid ID document, but it also serves as Voting Card designed to prove that the holder is a registered voter in his/her declared commune of residence.

According to the Interior Ministry, virtually all citizens aged 18 and over, have been given a National Identity Card whose production was financed by international assistance. Therefore, there should be very little need to issue 1018 Forms if it were not for election fraud.

The SRP has collected substantial evidence showing that CPP local authorities in fact methodically issued the 1018 Forms to illegitimate voters in order to substantially inflate votes for the CPP. Illegitimate voters are under-aged people, non-registered citizens, migrant workers unable to return to vote in the commune where they were originally registered, and foreigners living in Cambodia. The CPP gave them the identity of "ghost voters" who are officially on the voter list but do not actually exist or are not present. These "ghost voters" are deceased people, twice-registered voters and voters who have permanently moved away from the commune.

In what was presented as a "cleaning-up" process that started in the second half of 2007, "ghost voters" were deliberately kept on the voter registry while names of legitimate voters known as non-CPP supporters were deliberately deleted from the voter registry. The CPP-subservient National Election Committee killed two birds with one stone: On the one hand it built up a reserve of hundreds of thousands of "ghost voters" for the CPP, and on the other hand it disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of political opponents/opposition supporters.

Illegitimate voters, who had been bribed by the CPP beforehand, were taken to specific venues (such as CPP village chiefs' houses) and given forged 1018 Forms showing ghost' names, fake thumbprints and false dates (most of the Forms were issued on Voting Day but are backdated). Only the photos are real photos of the Forms' bearers/illegitimate voters.

All the 1018 Forms were certified, with signatures and official stamps, by CPP commune chiefs from all over the country. We have hundreds of those Forms in our possession along with the real identities of those people who received the Forms as shown in their National Identity Cards.

Article 49 titled "Forgery of Public Document" of the 1992 UNTAC Criminal Law still in force in Cambodia states, "Any elected official or civil servant (…) who, while performing official duties or tasks related to such duties, commits a forgery, either by false signature, or by alteration of a deed, writing or signature, or by impersonation (…), is guilty of forgery of a public document and shall be liable to a term of imprisonment of five to fifteen years."

SRP Members of Parliament

For more information please call 092 888 001 or 092 888 002