If you think 142 unreturned ballot papers is bad...

...what do you think of a figure of 8,176 unreturned ballot papers? That happened in the parliamentary constituency of Lumut in the 1999 general elections. From Malaysiakini:

Lumut tops unreturned ballots count
Soon Li Tsin
May 3, 07 11:47am

An election expert has revealed that a shocking number of 8,176 ballots were unreturned in the Lumut parliamentary seat in Perak during the 1999 general election.

Wong Chin Huat who is a research fellow with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (Ikmas) sent malaysiakini the data he had tabled based on the Election Commission’s report of previous general elections.

In 1999, BN’s Kong Cho Ha defeated PKR’s Zaman Huri Samsudin by 605-vote majority when there were 8,176 unreturned ballots.

Considering the large number of unreturned ballots, Kong’s win would be highly suspect because the win could have swayed to PKR.

(for the rest of the article, click here)

If this is not proof of complete incompetence of the Election Commission (let's not call it "fraud" yet), I don't know what is. I personally do not understand how such a thing could happen. When a person walks into the balloting room, you will take a ballot paper from the EC officers in full view of the observers. Then you will walk to the balloting booth and then walk the center of the room, again in full view of the observers, to drop the ballot into the boxes. Now I don't know if the proposal for transparent ballot boxes have been accepted (the current ones are black and opaque), but it would be a neat feat of sleight of hand should a voter pretends to drop the ballot into the box, but in actual fact didn't. And this done in front of the observers.

Now unless the observers (usually representatives from all contesting parties) are all bought as well, it really baffles me how anyone could smuggle out ballot papers just like that. Unless of course outright fraud is being committed, and somehow ballots were taken out of the boxes before they arrive at the counting stations.

Like election specialist Wong Chin Huat mentioned, there are ghosts, thieves and beasts in the elections. Perhaps ghosts and thieves are in cahoots with interested parties to spirit away ballot papers, introduce ballot boxes out of nowhere, making the dead vote, and if that is not enough the beasts will go to town terrorizing the opponent and voters with violence.