KUALA LUMPUR, 7 Nov 2008: An opposition Member of Parliament (MP) says the Election Commission (EC) has lost its integrity because it is unable to verify the status of 11,842 voters on the electoral roll.
Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh said it was illogical that the commission was unable to confirm whether these voters’ should be removed from the electoral roll because the National Registration Department (NRD) was still verifying their status.
“This explanation just doesn’t make sense considering that the EC has a new online data entry system under a big allocation in Budget 2009. Is such a big allocation for the EC valid if it cannot guarantee the transparency of our election system?” Fuziah said in a press statement today.
The statement was in response to the answer she received in the Dewan Rakyat on 6 Nov to an oral question about the status of 11,842 voters who had registered using their old identity cards.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had written a reply to Fuziah, from Parti Keadilan Rakyat, to say that the NRD was still verifying the voters’ status.
Fuziah said there were electoral discrepancies in Kuantan in the 8 March general election, citing several cases of voters who were older than 100 years.
She also said there were dead voters whose names were on the electoral roll in March. This was despite having had their names removed in an earlier clean-up exercise by the EC at the end of 2006, she said.
She also claimed that new identity cards were issued to show that some dead voters were born in 1985, when their year of birth in their old identity cards was 1885.
“I call for integrity to be returned to the EC so that it can act as an independent body,” Fuziah said. 
