Cannot remove 13,000 mystery voters
Published on: Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Kota Kinabalu: Sabah has the most number of doubtful voters - 13,000 out of 42,000 identified nationwide - but their names cannot be deleted from the electoral list without their next of kin coming forward to confirm their status.Election Commission (EC) Chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof said none of the 13,000 "mystery voters" in Sabah could be traced until now. "Unfortunately we could not trace any. No one, including political people, have come forward to tell us where these people are É we are striving to trace their whereabouts," he told a press conference at a 13th General Election briefing for Sabah and Labuan at Pacific Sutera, Tuesday.
ADVERTISEMENT
He was asked on the Sabah findings during the electoral roll clean up exercise, one of the 10 recommendations made by the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) on Electoral Reform which had been adopted by the Commission. Phantom voter issues have been a hotly debated topic in Sabah, with several leaders in the State demanding for a Royal Commission of Enquiry (RCI) on illegal immigrants and the alleged "Project IC".Abdul Aziz said they received a lot of assistance from the National Registration Department (NRD) and had exhibited the names for public viewing, sent compact discs containing these names to the political parties and community leaders to assist in locating the persons involved. "There is great possibility that they or most of them already have other identification documents, but that is just our guess," he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
On the age of the voters involved, Abdul Aziz said most of them are old, including over 90. "Initially I intended to just drop these names from the electoral roll but the law said I cannot do that. "Although they cannot be traced, we cannot simply drop their names because we fear they may suddenly appear later and there will be a dispute," he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Asked on the area where most out of these 13,000 voters had been registered, he said they are from all over Sabah. "I am currently discussing with my legal adviser on how we can drop these names from the roll. Legally speaking these names cannot be dropped, unless it has been confirmed that the person has already died," he said. The Commission has also sent the names in the electoral roll to Mimos Berhad, an entity under the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry, in accordance with the PSC recommendation, as part of the cleaning up effort. "But I was made to understand that there are no more double names in the electoral roll (meaning one person with two identification documents). Both Mimos and the NRD told us the same thing," he said. "(But) whatever it is, I want to stress here that the election process in this country is truly fair, and the winning or losing of a candidate has nothing to do with the Election Commission. Earlier, he said there were 882,339 registered voters in Sabah based on the latest electoral roll (gazetted on Nov. 29, 2011) of whom 867,534 are normal voters and the remaining 14,805 are absent voters (police, army and those at overseas). In Labuan, there are 23,237 voters. Of the figure for Sabah, 444,647 (50.39 per cent) are men and women, 437,692. In terms of age, those aged between 30-39 are the most accounting for 217,563, followed by those aged between 40-49 (214,803), between 50-59 (165,792) and between 21-29 (140,753). There are 14,994 of others aged between 80-89, while those aged 90 and above number 1,527. Abdul Aziz said there has been an increase in the number of voters registered in Sabah, but at the same time regretted there are still a great number of eligible voters who have yet to register in the State. About 36 per cent of eligible voters in Sabah have yet to register so far, he said, adding that this is more than the national percentage of about 20 per cent. THE EC Chairman urged Malaysians in Sabah who have reached the voting age of 21 to register to make them eligible to vote in the coming election.He said that out of 1.19 million people in the state who are aged 21 and above, there are still 312,070 who have not registered as electors. "I am advising them to register quickly; there is still time because the electoral roll will only be gazetted in May," he said.Abdul Aziz also announced that vote-counting process would only begin at 4pm for the polling centres which closed early. "In the previous election, the ballot papers were counted as early as noon at several centres including in the Kinabatangan and Pensiangan parliamentary constituencies in Sabah," he said. The latest move was important, he said, to prevent the possibility of a result leak, and certain people using the information to launch a psychological war. Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
Daily Express Malaysia
