Voting
results at more than 200 newly established polling stations were
“heavily skewed” towards the ruling party at the July election, while
seven communes recorded voter turnouts in excess of 110 per cent of
eligible voters, a new report from an umbrella group of election
monitors has found.
Sixty-nine per cent of the 209 new polling
stations established for this election were won by the ruling Cambodian
People’s Party, “well above the nationwide average where the ruling
party won 53% of the time”, the Electoral Reform Alliance (ERA) says in
the report officially slated for release on December 13 but posted online by the opposition party on Thursday.
Of
the 902 polling stations created for the election, 691 of them were
formed from the splitting of existing stations, 209 were newly
established, and two relocated, says the report, prepared by groups
including Transparency International, the National Democratic Institute,
Comfrel, NICFEC and Licadho.
New polling stations are created to
provide for increasing numbers of voters in any one area, as according
to the election law, no single polling station can have more than 700 people registered.
These
new stations were largely located in the battleground provinces of
Battambang, Kampong Cham, Kampong Speu, Kandal, Phnom Penh, Prey Veng
and Siem Reap, the report shows.
But the National Election Committee yesterday rejected the insinuation that the new polling stations somehow helped the CPP.
“We
don’t create new [stations] to follow the political will of any party,
but we create them based on the increase of new voters. Every election
new polling stations [are created],” NEC secretary-general Tep Nytha
said yesterday.
“At each station there are only 700 voters. If we create them for only this or that party to win , where would the new voters be to vote [for them]?”
The
ERA report also compares the total number of valid votes cast at
polling stations according to the National Election Committee with the
number of eligible voters living in the area as of late 2012 per the
UNDP-sponsored Commune Database (CDB).
New polling stations in
general had “unusually high turnout rates”, the report says.
Forty-six-and-a-half per cent of new polling stations had a turnout rate
of between 80 and 100 per cent, while those lofty numbers were matched
at just 19.3 per cent of existing stations.
According to the NEC, overall turnout nationally was 69.61 per cent of registered voters.
The
report lists 32 communes, 12 of which are located in Kandal, where
voter turnout was found to be above 100 per cent of the eligible voting
population.
Of the seven communes where the report found voting
rates above 110 per cent, every single one had been found to have
registration rates above 135 per cent (in two communes it was above 200
per cent) in a pre-election investigation by the Post that compared CDB
figures to the NEC voter list.
Similarly, of the 32 communes
found to have voter turnout rates above 100 per cent according to the
report, all but one had been found to have over-registration rates above
108 per cent in the Post’s investigation.
Varin district’s Lvea
Kraing commune in Siem Reap province had a voter turnout rate of 120.3
per cent, the highest in the country, according to the report.
In
an August report, rights group Licadho identified a polling station in
Lvea Kraing commune where 692 soldiers from Preah Vihear and Oddar
Meanchey were allegedly trucked en masse to vote.
“In polling
stations with turnout well higher than the country’s median, [the] CPP
performed above its national average,” the report says, although it does
not identify whether the same was true for turnout rates higher than
100 per cent.
“This was most frequently seen in competitive
provinces. Interestingly, in several high-stakes provinces when voter
turnout was consistent with the national average in a polling station,
CNRP won, but in polling stations with extraordinarily large turnout,
CPP won.”
The NEC also rejected the claim that voter turnout in
certain communes was above 100 per cent, with Nytha simply labelling the
claim as “not true”.
“I
don’t believe it.… I just want to say that however many people are in
the voter list – we only allow those people to vote,” he said.
The
ERA report also found “unusual patterns” in changes made during the
2012 voter registry update to polling stations in particular areas.
The
hotly contested provinces of Kampong Cham, Kandal and Takeo all had
more than 100 polling stations where the number of registered voters
spiked by at least 50 per cent before this election, with Siem Reap,
Prey Veng, Phnom Penh, Kampong Speu and Battambang having more than 80
stations with the same level of increase.
The report also found
that more than 50 per cent of voters were deleted from voter lists at a
number of polling stations in Siem Reap, Banteay Meanchey and Kampong
Cham.
“This would indicate that more than half of the people in
that polling station either died or moved in one year alone; assumptions
not backed up by demographic trends,” it says.
A key concern of
monitors before the election was that the mass issuance of more than
270,000 temporary Identity Certificate for Election (ICE) forms by
commune councils between the time the voter-registration period closed
and the election could be used to claim excess, invalid and duplicate
names on the voter list.
The ERA says that high ICE usage could
correlate to high voter turnout in certain areas but cannot verify this
claim as the NEC has not disclosed the ICEs distributed at a
commune-level, one of many complaints levelled against NEC transparency
in the report.
Nytha claimed yesterday that the documents had been
made available at both commune and provincial levels but were not
“viewed” by the NGOs. He added that the ICEs were only issued to those
who had lost their identification after registering.
Election
watchdogs have maintained that so many people losing their IDs in such a
short period does not make sense in the absence of a natural disaster.
Another
key issue raised by election watchdogs leading to the election was
missing names on the voter list, with the National Democratic
Institute’s voter list audit finding that 10.8 per cent of voters who
believed they were registered could not find their names on the voter
list. The ERA report reveals that number has since been scaled down to
8.8 per cent following a search of the full voter list database after
the election.
In comparison, the NEC changed its preliminary
missing name figure of nine per cent to three per cent after a search of
their internal database.
“Even if using the NEC’s 3% figure, the
number of excluded citizens is still greater than the difference in the
final vote share between the CPP and the CNRP, though it is not known
how many of them would have voted or for whom they would have voted,”
the report says.
The Cambodia National Rescue Party – which
continues to boycott parliament in protest of the election results –
said yesterday that the ERA report bolstered its call for an independent
investigation.
“It is very clear that the whole election was
crafted solely to see where [the CPP] could add on [votes] where they
were going to miss out. These [new] polling stations were crafted for
imported voters,” party public affairs head Mu Sochua said.
“The
more the NEC deny, the more and more they get themselves in trouble. If
you want people to know the truth you reveal the truth, you cooperate.”
But
the NEC, for its part, does not appear to believe that reports such as
the ERA’s reflect the truth. “We have more than 40,000 national
observers and 300 international observers. There are many NGOs and
observers that talk positive about the election result. We see only a
few NGOs that have said that this election was not free and fair,” Nytha
said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY DAVID BOYLE
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