SEREMBAN, Aug 1 — Voter turnout in the 16th Negeri Sembilan State Election stood at 28.11 per cent as of 11am today, according to Election Commission (EC) chairman Datuk Seri Ramlan Harun.
He said observations at several polling centres around Seremban showed encouraging participation in the morning, with senior citizens making up a larger number of voters compared to younger voters.
“We hope young voters will come out to cast their ballots earlier, as we anticipate the weather may not be favourable this evening.
“According to the weather forecast, Port Dickson is the only area expected to experience favourable weather until this evening, while other districts are likely to see rain,” he told reporters after inspecting the polling centre at Sekolah Menengah Agama Dato’ Klana Petra Maamor here today.
Ramlan said the EC expects voter turnout to reach between 72 and 75 per cent, taking into account the intense competition among contesting parties during the 14-day campaign period that began on July 18.
Meanwhile, Ramlan said the EC received 293 complaints involving election offences during the campaign period, including the installation of campaign posters that did not comply with regulations, with action taken on all cases by the monitoring team and relevant local authorities (PBT).
In the meantime, he said the pilot implementation of the Optical Character Recognition Voter Attendance System (OCR-VA) at SMA Dato’ Klana Petra Maamor, involving Streams One to Seven, was an initial step towards the use of digital technology in recording voter attendance in the future.
Ramlan said the pilot project did not involve any other aspect of the electoral process and was solely intended to assess the effectiveness of using identity cards to record voter attendance compared with the manual method used previously.
“We want to assess the system across different groups of voters, including senior citizens and younger voters. The size of this school made it suitable for the pilot project.
“It is just a pilot project, but we believe it is a good start for us to move in a better direction in the future. Many countries have already adopted digital registration,” he said
On the overall implementation of the system, Ramlan said the EC had yet to make any decision and would first evaluate the outcome of the pilot project and seek feedback from stakeholders.
A total of 859,760 registered voters, including 7,391 postal voters, are eligible to cast their ballots today to elect representatives for the 36 state seats contested by 103 candidates.
A total of 14,995 early voters, or 91.06 per cent of those eligible, exercised their voting rights on July 28, exceeding the EC’s 90 per cent turnout target.
For the latest news on the 16th Negeri Sembilan state election, visit https://prn.bernama.com/n9. — Bernama
