Elections Department looking to make voting easier for overseas Singaporeans, nursing home residents

THE Elections Department (ELD) is planning to roll out a postal voting pilot for overseas Singaporeans and on-site polling stations for voters residing at some nursing homes to improve voting accessibility.

There are some 200,000 Singaporeans based overseas. A total of 6,570 of them registered to vote in General Election 2020. Of these, 4,794 cast their votes at one of the 10 overseas polling stations.

Pending stakeholder consultation and if there is keen pickup of the postal voting option during the pilot, ELD said it might also consider removing the overseas polling stations.

Some common challenges surrounding postal voting identified by ELD include security and secrecy of the ballot; determining if the person who marked the postal ballot is the voter and is doing so without duress or benefit; ensuring that the ballots will be posted and received in time; and discrepancy between the number of postal ballot papers issued and the number of votes received.

To circumvent this, ELD is proposing that both postal ballot papers and return envelopes be delivered via electronic means to ensure they are received in a timely manner. It also plans to require overseas Singaporeans to submit a specimen signature when registering as postal voters. These voters will have to sign physically on the return envelope when mailing back to ELD.

It also plans to require voters to return their marked postal ballot papers to ELD no later than 10 days after Polling Day. The postal ballot must be posted before Polling Day in Singapore.

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All other voting eligibility requirements, which includes having a local contact address and having resided in Singapore for at least 30 days during the 3-year period, still apply.

These proposed arrangements and pilot are pending consultation with local political parties (to be held on May 25 and 28) and overseas Singaporeans via online survey, which will be open until Jun 8.

For nursing home operators, the consultation will be held on Jun 2 and 3. ELD said it would share an update on the results of the public consultation in July and that it is considering piloting these new voting modalities at the upcoming Presidential Election due by September 2023.

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For the nursing home pilot, ELD is proposing to set up an on-site polling station within the nursing home and/or deploy a mobile team to bring the ballot box and ballot papers from bed-to-bed for those that are not mobile.

For transparency, ELD is also proposing to allow 1 polling agent per candidate to observe polling proceedings. This will be similar to what was done for GE2020 for voters serving stay-home notice at designated hotels.

There are 77 nursing homes with 16,300 licensed nursing home beds in Singapore as at 2020, according to the Ministry of Health website. The plan is to extend the pilot to larger nursing homes of different profiles, pending feedback from the consultation.