CAMBODIA’S PEACEFUL AND CROOKED COMMUNE ELECTIONS

"Opinion" published in The Cambodia Daily - Monday, June 11, 2012

 

By Mu Sochua

More sophisticated election manipulation techniques meant the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) could afford to reduce the level of political violence, while ensuring victory before voting day even arrived. These techniques, used on an unprecedented scale in June 3 commune elections, are disenfranchisement, to reduce votes for the opposition, and impersonation, to inflate votes for the ruling party. The tools used are non-existent ghost voters and fraudulent voter identification documents. The elections were even more unreal as voter turnout dropped from more than 80% previously to a historic low of 60%.

Yet, the CPP was unable to prevent a shift in the balance of power in favor of the democratic opposition represented by the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and the Human Rights Party (HRP). This resulted from the collapse of CPP’s two docile “royalist” allies: Funcinpec (FUN) and the Norodom Ranariddh Party (NRP).

Compared with results from previous local elections in 2007, the CPP and its two allies lost 295 commune councilor positions to the two democratic opposition parties. The latter now control at least 125 communes compared with 28 in 2007. This is based on the composition of commune councils where the combined opposition controls a majority of votes, regardless of the political affiliation of the commune chief.

With 3.64 million votes, the CPP increased its share of the popular vote from 58.1 percent at the last national assembly elections in 2008, to 62 percent. This resulted mainly from voter impersonation on an unprecedented scale. In the absence of impersonation, ballot tampering, intimidation and vote buying, the CPP would have hit a ceiling at about 2.5 million votes, or 40 percent, similar to what they obtained at the U.N.-organized national assembly elections in 1993.

The SRP, with 1.22 million votes, saw a marginal decrease in its share from 21.9 percent to 20.8 percent. The performance was resilient given the absence of founding president Sam Rainsy, who has been in unjust, forced exile for nearly three years. Furthermore, SRP voters have borne the brunt of the disenfranchisement campaign affecting 1.5 million legitimate voters, according to independent observers.

With 574,000 votes, the HRP significantly increased its share from 6.6 percent to 9.8 percent, from a relatively low base. It performed particularly well in some provinces around Phnom Penh.

The CPP allies, FUN and the NRP, scored 396,000 votes, a sharp drop from 10.7 percent to 6.7 percent.

Counting the fraudulent votes with the real ones, the government bloc’s share of the popular vote was roughly stable at 68.7 percent. The SRP and HRP democratic opposition increased its share from 28.5 percent to 30.6 percent. But without the disenfranchisement and impersonation decried by all independent observers, the democratic opposition would probably have won more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

This goal will be achieved at the next national elections scheduled for July 28, 2013, provided the CPP-controlled National Election Committee is reformed in line with recommendations from independent national and international election observers.

Mu Sochua is a Sam Rainsy Party lawmaker