The recent Malaysian elections.

Recently, Malaysia has gone ahead and held their federal elections. Since half of my extended family is in that merry country just north of the Causeway, things do filter down to me through the grapevine, and it's really both a mixture of hilarious and sad, the kind of mixture that makes you want to shut yourself in a padded cell until it's safe to come out.

This, folks, is what "democracy" looks like. In retrospect, it could be argued that Malaysia was better governed under either the British Colonial government or when the thirteen sultans of the states held absolute power.

"But everyone knows monarchs are evvvil!"

Well, friend, let's have a look at these democratically elected leaders in action:


Reports of the not so 'indelible' ink, phantom voters, legitimate voters being turned away due to having 'already' cast a vote, voting slips completed in pencil as well as reports of mysterious vehicles allegedly carrying extra ballot boxes into vote tally centers have painted a grim picture for the fairness of the electoral procedure.

Other interesting things I've heard from my relatives on the grapevine include sudden blackouts in areas with counting centers, demands for numerous vote recounts until the tallies came up in favour of a candidate, and other election shenanigans.

Although seriously, with rampant voter fraud in the US, that shining paragon of democracy and the free world, why are we so surprised that all sorts of hilarity begins to surface when other countries do it, too?

Here's a video of public unrest over suspected manipulation of vote-counting:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=341408225981663

Another photo of public unrest over ballot boxes being carried over from other counting centres:

Open rioting in Kuala Lumpur, the capital:

Barbed wire being deployed to control crowds in Johor Baru:

And a phantom voter being arrested for voter fraud in a small village where everyone knows everyone:

 

So much for democracy, my friends. Despite all this happening and the incumbents winning again, no one seems to want to admit a simple truth:

Executive power trumps democracy.

Always.

And yet like socialism, people keep on trumpeting its virtues. "We just haven't done it right, we'll make good on it this time around." "It's the best system of those that have been tried." So they complain, they whine, they mumble Bad Things(TM) against the incumbent government...and then they willingly go back into the little cog-spaces of their machine lives.

Sound familiar?

Well, good luck to the Malaysians. They'll need it.