The Process of Election

With great power, comes great responsibility. A leader is chosen because of his or her charismatic appearance, trusted manifestos or simply he is known by the people. The process of choosing a leader might be different, depending on the type of governance system in the country. Three types of governance system are democratic system, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism. There are two forms of democracy; namely the American Model and the British Model. The British Model portrays the parliament system (Moten & Islam, 2011). The people have the right to choose their leader by the process named election. There are six steps in the process of conducting a general election or a by-election. They are, the issuance of writ, nomination, election campaign, polling, counting of votes and lastly, the announcement of the results (refer to Appendix 1).

The first step in conducting general election is the issuance of writ step. During this process, a writ is issued to the Returning Officer of every constituency that member is elected in consequence of the dissolution of the Parliament or a State Legislative Assembly or in the event of a casual vacancy. The writ that is given to the Returning Officer gives them power to conduct the election. The election is then will be conducted by the Election Committee (Mokhtar, 2008). Then, for the public view, a notice of election is gazetted. The notices are then posted at any convenient places. The nomination date and also the dates of polling are stated on the notice (Suruhanjaya Pilihanraya Malaysia, 2011).

The second step in conducting general election is the nomination step. The Returning Officer receives the nomination forms from the candidate, proposer and seconder or from any one or two of them. T...

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...must also complete by them. Forms 14 and 15 are taken to the Official Vote Tallying Centre. The Returning Officer checks them each personally and the result for every polling station is announced. In case of any suspicion of arithmetical errors, the numbers in Form 14 and Form 13 are matched by the Returning Officer (Suruhanjaya Pilihanraya Malaysia, 2011).

The last step in conducting of the election is the announcement of the results. The candidate that gets an easy majority is declared as the winner. Then, once the Returning Officer confirms his winning, he will be elected as the representative for the constituency concerned. All the decision that is made by the Returning Officer is ultimate and if there is a party that are unsatisfied of the elections result, they need to concede an election petition to the Election Court (Suruhanjaya Pilihanraya Malaysia, 2011)