Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - 16:16
by Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani
KUALA LUMPUR: The actual number of dubious voters was 78 times more than the 42,000 figure given by Election Commission (EC) chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) discovered.
KUALA LUMPUR: The actual number of dubious voters was 78 times more than the 42,000 figure given by Election Commission (EC) chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) discovered.
Its director, Ong Kian Ming, said Merap found 3.3 million cases of unverifiable votes, of which 3.1 million voters' addresses conflicted with the ones on their ICs and registered constituencies.
He was responding to Abdul Aziz's comment in a local Chinese daily that Malaysia had the cleanest electoral roll in the world and that the EC had cleared all disputed names in the electoral register.
"Obviously, the EC chairman has not studied our preliminary findings that identified problems in the electoral roll involving approximately 100,000 voters. Upon further analysis, this number could easily rise to 400,000.
"Upon further checks, we found another 3.3 million cases of doubtful voters which need further investigation," he told a news conference yesterday.
He said the 3.3 million cases include 65,455 "foreigners" registered in the roll with 106,743 cases of deletion and 6,762 cases of additions without public display from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the third quarter of 2011.
"The presence of the 3.1 million voters whose IC addresses do not match their voting constituencies is troubling because this information was given to the EC by the National Registration Department (NRD) in 2002, before the implementation of the new registration system where all voters had to register according to the constituency indicated by their IC address," he said.
Ong claimed the EC had failed pursue report findings made by the NRD and had yet to clean up the electoral roll of non-resident voters, contravening Article 119 1(b) of the Federal Constitution which stipulates that a voter must be a resident in the constituency he is voting.
He said the EC also kept detailed records of a voter's race but there were more than 65,000 foreigners registered in the electoral roll, including Bruneians, Filipinos, Indonesians and Pakistanis.
"Of the 65,000, almost 90 per cent or 59,000 have IC numbers indicating they were born in Malaysia. Also, 49,000 or 75 per cent of the foreign voters can be found in Sabah," he said.
He said detailed analysis of electoral rolls from 2008, 2010 and 2011 revealed there were 106,000 voters removed and about 7,000 voters added without public display.
He said important details and information were missing from the roll including reasons for removing voters, such as death, losing citizenship status or joining the army or police.
