It said the short campaign period would create challenges for postal voters, especially overseas postal voters (Category 1B), who may struggle to deliver their ballots to the returning officers on time.

“Since the 14th general election, we have received numerous reports from overseas voters that by the time they received their postal ballots, it was either very close to polling day or past the date.

“Campaign periods should be a minimum of 21 days,” said the electoral watchdog in a statement.

If the EC is unwilling to extend the campaign period, Bersih proposed a comprehensive reform of the postal voting system by allowing postal voters to download their ballots and related documents in PDF format.

“This would also eliminate clerical errors commonly found with the current process of manually writing out serial numbers and stuffing envelopes. It would also be a huge cost savings for the EC,” it said.

Earlier today, the EC announced that polling day for the six state elections will fall on Aug 12, with early voting set for Aug 8. Nominations will be on July 29.

It said the closing date for early voting applications is July 8 for Malaysians residing overseas, July 11 for agencies or organisations, and July 26 for the media, army, police and election officials.

EC chairman Abdul Ghani Salleh said a total of 9,773,571 voters were eligible to cast their ballots in the six states.