Monday, April 23, 2012 - 14:29
by Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani
KUALA LUMPUR: The actual number of dubious voters was 78 times more than the 42,000 figure given by the Election Commission (EC) chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, says the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap).
KUALA LUMPUR: The actual number of dubious voters was 78 times more than the 42,000 figure given by the Election Commission (EC) chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, says the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap).
Project director, Ong Kian Ming, said Merap had found 3.3 million cases of unverifiable votes of which 3.1 million voters have conflicting addresses for their IC and registered constituencies.
He was responding to Abdul Aziz’s interview with a local Chinese daily where he reportedly said that Malaysia has the cleanest electoral roll in the world and that the EC had already cleared the disputed 42,000 names in the electoral register.
“Obviously, the EC chairman has not bothered to look in the preliminary findings of Merap which found that the ten initial problems indentified in the electoral roll involved approximately 100,000 voters and this number could easily rise to 400,000 upon further analysis.
“Today, I want to announce that upon further investigation and analysis, another 3.3 million cases of doubtful voters which needs further investigation have been uncovered,” he said during a press conference today at the Kuala Lumpur Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall.
He said the 3.3 million cases include 65,455 “foreigners” who are registered in the roll with 106,743 cases of deletion and 6,762 cases of additions without public display from fourth quarter of 2010 to third quarter of 2011.
“The presence of the 3.1 million voters whose IC addresses do not correspond to their voting constituencies is particularly troubling because this information was given to EC by the National Registration Department (JPN) 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 that the EC had failed pursue on the findings made by JPN and has yet to clean up the electoral roll of non-resident voters, contravening with Article 119 1(b) of the Federal Constitution which stipulates that a voter must be a resident in the constituency that he is voting.
He further noted that the EC also keeps detailed records of the individual voter’s race and that there are more than 65,000 foreigners registered in the electoral roll, including Bruneians, Filipinos, Indonesians and Pakistanis.
“Of the 65,000 foreign voters, almost 90 per cent (59,000) have IC numbers which indicate they were born in Malaysia. Also troubling is the fact that 49,000 (75 per cent) of the foreign voters can be found in the state of Sabah,” he said.
He added detailed analysis of electoral rolls from 2008, 2010 and 2011 have found that there were 106, 000 voters removed without and about 7,000 voters added without public display.
He said important details and information were missing from the roll including reasons as to why voters were being removed from the electoral register like death, losing citizenship status or joining the army or police.
“The failure of the EC to take any actions on these problematic cases, which total 3.4 million thus far, is an indication that they are not serious about tacking the deep rooted problems of the electoral roll.
“Whether these were problems which were created in the past or those problems which were are still arising because of abuses of the system in the present time,” he said.