PAP shoring up their votes with new citizens

On February 7, 1986, the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos tried to rig the Presidential Election in his favor through the intimidation of voters, political killings and VOTE FRAUD. Eventually the People’s Power Movement broke out and army generals previously loyal to Marcos defected to Corazon Aquino’s side. And the rest is history.

Today in Singapore, a UNIQUE kind of VOTE manipulation seemed to be taking place. PAP’s aggressive importation of voters from aboard – beginning from China and India but more recently, from the Philippines.

Desperate to escape the vicious cycle of poverty and crime back in their home country, many Filipinos willingly come to Singapore to settle, work and take up the Pink Identification Card offered to them like pancakes by the current PAP regime.

Many seemed to believe they have arrived to a genuine first-world country. Perhaps even an heavenly paradise. They would have no faintest idea of what had happened in the past: The 1963 Operation Coldstore which jailed more than 100 alleged leftists and Opposition leaders and activists including Lim Chin Siong, the 1987 Operation Spectrum which arrested 20 Roman Catholic Church social workers accused of being Marxists and the numerous politically motivated defamation suits which bankrupted Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, Dr Chee Soon Juan and the lesser known Wee Han Kim. And forced someone like Tang Liang Hong and Francis Seow to spend their last years of their life in exile aboard. And the intimidation of voters, especially those living Opposition-held constituencies that upgrading projects would be withheld should they continue to vote against the ruling PAP.

And who could also forget what had exactly happened in Cheng San GRC during the 1997 GE-when PAP leaders, including the then PM Goh Chok Tong, openly walked into a polling station talking and shaking hands with voters when the constitution and the law clearly forbids this.

PAP is evidently trying to take advantage of the historical ignorance of these new citizens voters and is making use of them to pad up the party’s vote numbers. The only difference from what Fernindad Marco did is they seemed to be doing it brazenly, boldly and openly in broad daylight, “legally”.

UNIQUELY SINGAPORE indeed.

Liew Chin Fu