Third Time’s A Charm (Hopefully!)

Like the majority of Malaysians today, I trooped over to my polling station early this morning to vote but I forgot to bring my voter registration details which can be downloaded and printed out from the Suruhanjaya Pilihan Raya Malaysia website. It’s important to bring this along if you want to be fast tracked to whichever classroom you have been assigned to cast your vote. I did this in 2008 and I didn’t have to queue up to have my confirm my registration.

When I arrived at the polling station before 9am, there was such a long queue at the classrooms and an even longer queue for checking the registration. I checked with one of the officers and he asked me whether I’d printed out the form in which case I could go straight to the classroom but if I hadn’t brought the form, then I had to join the hundreds of people in the queue to check the registration, said queue had stretched to an adjoining road.

I decided to scoot home to print out the details so I didn’t have to queue up and when I got back with the piece of paper barely an hour later, there was some other fellow standing at the gate who refused to let me enter the premises. He directed me to the long queue waiting to have their registration checked and told me that I had to join THAT queue even though I had the requisite piece of paper in my hands. What more proof did they need that I had registered. That would defeat the purpose of printing out that piece of paper. Why were there different rules before 9am and another set of rules after 9am? That was just ridiculous but I wasn’t about to argue. I’d just have to come back later and hope that fellow wasn’t on duty any more.

So after the heavy thunderstorm and knowing that the crowds would have thinned out, I headed back to the polling station. This time, there was no need to check the details of my registration. I was just asked which classroom I was headed to and ushered that way. I’d have cast my vote a lot earlier if it wasn’t for the person with his own set of rules the 2nd time I was there. I must be one of the few people who went to their polling station thrice.

So I have has my index finger manicured by the indelible ink but how indelible is it really? My friend who went to her polling station much earlier than me said that part of it had washed off with water even before she left the polling station as she had to use the facilities there after casting her vote and when she went home, she sprayed JIF on her finger and left it for a minute, washed it off and the ink was all gone.

Since I don’t have JIF, I used another solvent and here’s how it went. The first image below is what my finger looked like when I left the polling station, I’d used wet wipes to wipe off the excess ink. Even with wet wipes, a lot of it had come off.

What I used to remove the ink was this product which is in just about every household, nothing special and certainly not acid.

There are still traces of it around the seams of my nails but I haven’t even tried vigorously scrubbing the skin and already much of it has disappeared. This has been such an interesting day. No matter who wins tonight, let’s hope for a better Malaysia, one we can all be proud of.