Deprived of Their Right to Vote

As many as 1,093 Singaporeans informed the Elections Department Singapore ("ELD", a department under the Prime Minister's Office) during the 2023 Presidential Election ("PE") that their names were not in the register of electors, even though they had last voted in the 2020 General Election ("GE").[1]

In its earlier press release on 24 August 2023, ELD had stated that 200 Singaporeans had informed ELD that they had been wrongly struck off from the register of electors following the issuance of the Writ of Election on 11 August 2023.

Mr Chan Chun Sing, Minister-in-charge of the Public Service, said in Parliament on 19 September, “For context, this number [1,093] averages one voter per polling station which had on average 2,400 registered voters in GE2020."

Mr Chan misses the point: one citizen wrongly omitted from the register of electors is one too many.

Mr Chan added, "I just want to assure the public that ELD has gone through the records, and while there is a margin of error, [it] is nowhere to the extent that you will call into question any of the election results that we have in recent memory.”[2]

Mr Chan misses the point again. Presidential and parliamentary elections are compulsory in Singapore. When ELD omits an elector from the register of electors, it deprives that citizen from exercising his or her democratic right to vote regardless of whether that one vote makes any difference in the result. Otherwise, a citizen who didn't vote in an election won't have to pay a fee to reinstate himself or herself in the register of electors.

Notes

1. Under the law, a citizen's name is removed from the register of electors if he or she fails to cast his or her vote in the last presidential or parliamentary election.

2. The point in this paragraph was not in ELD's Oral Reply to Parliamentary Questions on the Removal of Names from the Registers of Electors Eligible to Vote at Presidential Election 2023 and Technical Issues with Electronic Voter Registration System during Presidential Election 2023 (19 September 2023). It was reported, however, in Over 1,000 voters wrongly taken off voter rolls in PE 2023, due to human errors in GE 2020 (TODAY, 19 September 2023).