By Dr.
Ong Kian Ming, Project Director, Malaysia Electoral Roll Analysis Project
(MERAP), UCSI University
At least 3.4m cases or about 27% of the electoral roll
need to be further investigated
The
Election Commission (SPR) Chairman, Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, was reported
to have said, during an interview with Sin
Chew Daily, that Malaysia’s electoral roll is the “cleanest in the world”. Only
42,000 voters out of a total of 12.6million, or 0.3% of the total electoral roll
were considered unverifiable.
Obviously
the EC chairman has not bothered to look into the preliminary findings of the
Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (MERAP) which were reported and
published in Malaysiakini, The Malaysian Insider and Selangor Times over the
past two weeks. In this preliminary analysis, it was found that the 10 initial
problems identified in the electoral roll involved approximately 100,000 voters
and that this number could easily rise to 400,000 upon further analysis.
Today,
I want to announce that upon further investigation and analysis, another 3.3million
cases of doubtful voters which needs further investigation have been uncovered.
Among
this 3.3 million voters are:
(1)
3.1 million voters whose
IC addresses shows a different voting constituency from the constituency in
which the voter is actually voting in.
(2)
65455 “foreigners” who are
on the electoral roll
(3)
106,743 cases of deletions
and 6762 cases of additions without public display to the electoral roll from
Q4 2010 to Q3 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 SPR by the National Registration Department / Jabatan Pendaftaran
Negar (JPN) in 2002, before the implementation of the new registration system
where all voters had to be registered according to the constituency indicated
by their IC address.
It
seems that SPR failed to act on this information that was given by JPN and to
use this information to clean up the electoral roll even though the presence of
these non-resident voters contravened Article 119 1(b) of the Federal
Constitution which says that a voter must be a resident in the constituency
which he or she is voting in.
In
addition, it is also troubling to note that even though SPR keeps detailed
records of the “Bangsa” of individual voters, it seems not to be concerned with
the presence of more than 65 thousand “foreigners” in the electoral roll who
are “Bruneian, Cocos, Filipino, Indonesian, Pakistani” and so on. Of these 65
thousand “foreign” voters, almost 90% or 59 thousand of them have IC numbers
which indicate that they were born in Malaysia. Also troubling is the fact that
49 thousand or 75% of these “foreign” voters can be found in the state of
Sabah, where problems with foreigners being given fake ICs have been a long
documented problem.
Finally,
through a detailed analysis of the Q4 2010, Q1 to Q3 quarterly updates and the
Q3 2011 electoral roll, it was found that there were over 106 thousand voters
who were removed without public display and almost 7 thousand who were added
without public display.
It was
also noticed that in the Q4 quarterly update released by SPR to the political
parties, many of the details and information that were given in the Q1 to Q3
updates were missing including important information on the reasons for voters
being removed from the electoral roll such as death, joining the army / police,
losing their citizenship status and so on.
The
failure of SPR to take any action on these problematic cases, which total 3.4
million thus far, is an indication that they are not serious about tackling the
deep rooted problems of the electoral roll, whether these were problems which
were created in the past or those problems which are still arising because of
abuses of the system in the present time.
The
preliminary findings of MERAP shows that there are grave concerns about
potential irregularities in the electoral roll and that Malaysia is very far
from having the cleanest electoral roll in the world.
By Dr. Ong Kian Ming, Project Director, Malaysia Electoral Roll Analysis Project (MERAP), UCSI University
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