Malaysia Decides 2008 : My Experiences

I woke up early on Saturday at 6.00am. Prayed a little and prepared myself for the 2-hour drive to Ipoh (which is my hometown and where I was to cast my vote). I knew I wasn't really prepared for what was to come even though I had already decided on the candidate that I was going to vote for.

I left KL for Ipoh at about 8.30am. Arrived at my house in Ipoh at 10.30am. Traffic was surprisingly light for election day( I had expected a traffic jam).

This election was my first one as a voter. I took the short walk with my mum,who had voted many times before, from my house to SRK La Salle Canning Garden, which was my polling centre for the Ipoh Timur parliamentary seat and Canning state seat.

We arrived at my old primary school at about 11am, where there was a huge crowd of voters standing in line waiting for their turn at the polling streams on the ground floor (voting had started at 8am). We registered ourselves at the registration counter near the front gate. There was a policeman there, to make sure that everything went smoothly.

I managed to start a small conversation with this old Indian man. When he told me there was not much change since the 2004 election (the BN state assemblyman had promised to bring more development to the area), I was probably staring at the election outcome already. He also expressed his disappointment about the government's policies and their failure to fulfill their election promises from 2004, like weeding out corruption in the public sector, mismanagement of the economy and waste of public funds.Not surprisingly, they were things that I had to agree upon, although I had other things in mind (the indelible ink issue was one).

There were 8 polling streams at my polling centre. Polling streams 1-6 were on the ground floor, where mostly senior citizens were lining up for their turn. Polling streams 7-8 were on the first floor, where mostly the younger generation was to vote. My mum was assigned polling stream number 4 and I got polling stream number 8, which happened to be my old classroom.

What the Election Commission did was they made me climb up 2 flights of stairs to my polling stream while my mum had to wait in queue for her turn downstairs. There was only one person in front of me, and she was already casting her vote when I arrived at the door.

The polling clerk checked my Identity Card with the electoral roll that she had.My name was printed there, and she read out my details to the Election Commission officials that were in the room. I was then given my ballot papers, one for federal parliament and one for the state assembly.I marked X for the candidates that I voted for, then cast my ballots into the two separate ballot boxes.

And that was all I had to do. Waited for about 5 minutes and then casted my votes for both candidates. It all has come to an end after all the praying for who God wanted me to cast my votes for.

It was time for us to go home and wait for the results.