Klang MP Charles Santiago will know this Thursday if his application to get the EC to review electoral rolls in his constituency is successful, but he was also aghast that the commission thought it “normal” to have 28 per cent unidentified voters out of 500,000 new registrants in Malaysia’s most industrialised state, owing to people moving around in the country.
“When I read the news, I was thinking that it was the most irresponsible statement,” said Santiago of the EC deputy chief Wan Ahmad Omar who gave that reason last Friday.
The Klang MP had filed for a judicial review at the Shah Alam High Court last month to compel an investigation by the EC, which he claimed has been dragging its feet over the issue of suspect voters.
Santiago cited the cases of 6,000 doubtful voters, 3,457 voters whose names were removed from the roll without permission or information, and 2,195 voters who were transferred without consent.
Other PR lawmakers are watching to see the results of Santiago’s “test case” before following suit, including Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad.
“Actually the only option left to us is to bring to court,” the PAS MP said here, although he agreed that their chances might be slim.
Instead, Khalid will bank on public support to neutralise the effects of phantom voters.
DAP’s Teresa Kok agreed with Khalid, saying that she will ask her supporters to mobilise genuine voters to come out during polling day.
She suggested for voters to help out during the campaigning period, and to volunteer as polling and counting agents to monitor any possible wrongdoings.
“We can’t do much, because all of [the unidentified voters] are in the gazetted electoral roll,” the Kinrara assemblyman conceded, saying that she is getting the list of unidentified voters checked in her own state constituency.
“At our level, we have prepared our people, they are given a list of those names that can’t be located,” PKR’s Zuraida Kamaruddin told The Malaysian Insider.
“So if there are these people turning up to vote, we will have to do some initiative on our own to do some verification,” the Ampang MP said, detailing three stages of verification that she will implement.
In the first two steps, party members will protest to the EC including complaining through relevant forms, if blacklisted names and voters with dubious addresses appear in the final gazetted electoral roll.
Finally, they will dispute any irregularities found during checks on polling day, when party members will verify whether a voter is a foreigner or has not stayed long in the country before obtaining their identity cards.
Any irregularities in the electoral roll will be filed and recorded for documentation purposes so that court action can be taken after voting if necessary, Zuraida said.
“But at same time, we are not going to discount that we will stop them from voting,” she said, although she acknowledged that it would be an election offence to do so.
Khalid said, however, that although polling agents could cross-check electoral roll against Selangor’s list, not much could be done as they would be seen as preventing legitimate voters from voting.
The EC had said that it cannot stop those who are registered from voting, as it is their legitimate right to do so even if they could not be traced.
Selangor’s initiatives have received the thumbs-up from election watchdog Bersih, who urged the state government to continue pressing this issue, including taking the legal route.
“They have to continue publicising this ... Maybe they can go to court to compel the EC to act. They should also lodge a police report,” suggested Bersih co-chair Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan.
The independent coalition reiterated their support to Selangor, saying it will provide the state government information, but did not furnish further details on its own action regarding the issue, which it described as “affecting everyone”.
Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (MERAP) director Dr Ong Kian Ming admitted that political parties could only do so much, considering that the law stated that the electoral roll cannot be legally challenged in court.
Selangor could pursue legal means or provide the list of untraceable voters to alert polling agents of political parties, said Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh, the president of the watchdog group Malaysians for Free and Fair Elections (MAFREL).
Zuraida summed up Election 2013 as “a very important election” and called for her comrades to be careful, since one vote will determine a win for either side.
The EC has reportedly refused to work together with PR in an effort to clear up the electoral roll, claiming that Selangor has gone to the media for political mileage instead of directly meeting the commission.
PR won 36 out of a total of 56 state seats in Selangor in the last general election where PKR’s Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim replaced Umno’s Dr Mohd Khir Toyo as mentri besar.
Some PR leaders have alleged that the influx of new voters in the state was part of a BN conspiracy to topple the Khalid administration through cheating. BN leaders have denied the allegation.
A poll analysis recently found that the highest concentration of dubious voters was in Selangor, the country’s wealthiest state that Prime Minister Najib has pledged to take back “at all costs.”