Published on: Tuesday, January 28, 2003 |
Kota Kinabalu: Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) has urged the Election Commission (EC) to scrutinise and revise the way it goes about its work.
Its Secretary General, Datuk Radin Malleh, said it was resolved in the partys Supreme Councils meeting on Jan 23 that the EC should re-study its system and modus operandi on voter registration, cleaning of the electoral rolls and also the re-delineation exercise.
He said the conduct of the all-year round voter registration not only had caused confusion among the people but the approach was exposed to more abuse of the system.
The poor response to the registration exercise also shows that the approach is not effective and this would render the system to be easily abused that even foreigners can also register themselves as voters after acquiring illegal ICs, he claimed.
Radin said the party agreed with Gerakan President Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaiks statement that the EC should first clean the electoral rolls before holding the next election.
All Malaysians especially Sabahans should be united to protect their rights and the sovereignty of the nation by not allowing foreigners to grab their rights when these foreigners become citizens automatically with the use of false supporting documents to obtain ICs, he said.
Radin claimed hundreds of thousands of foreigners who acquired ICs illegally are registered as voters in Sabah.
He added that the list of names and numbers of ICs of these foreigners had been submitted to the relevant authorities including the EC and the National Registration Department (NRD).
He said while it was true that the names of IC numbers were indeed found in the database of the NRD Ö we know such ICs were issued or acquired illegally.
If we are not united to protect our rights and the nations sovereignty, the country will disintegrate just like Yugoslavia as pointed out by the Deputy Prime Minister, he said.
On the re-delineation exercise, Radin said the public was given too short a time to inspect the EC recommendations on the respective constituencies.
According to Part 2 of the 13th Schedule of the Federal Constitution, the public is given one month to make any representation with respect to the proposed recommendations to the Election Commission.
Likewise, under Section 7 of the same schedule, the EC is required to comply again with Section 4 of the said schedule to display for the second time the revised recommendations as if no earlier notice had been published, he said.
However, he said the EC had not complied with the procedure for delimitation of constituencies as provided for under Schedule 13th of the Federal Constitution.
