EC insincere in cleaning up electoral rolls, says PAS
By Lisa J Ariffin, The Malaysian Insider
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 15 — The Election Commission (EC) has no intention of cleaning the existing electoral roll with its statement that there are no clean voter lists across the world, PAS information chief Datuk Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man said today.
He added that EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof’s remark “there is no clean electoral roll in the world” is similar to the Malay folklore figure Pak Pandir who said “not only our children will pass away, other people’s children will also pass away”.
“This statement reflects the real attitude of the EC, which has no direct intention to favour the people and vigorously clean the existing electoral roll,” Tuan Ibrahim said in a statement.
He noted that the EC had been obstinate about denying its weaknesses over the years but pressure from the opposition has led it to acknowledge there are deficiencies in the electoral roll.
But Tuan Ibrahim said the confession is far from sincere with Abdul Aziz blaming “technical errors that occurred during the process of the National Registration Department (JPN) profiling”.
“The electoral roll has about 12.3 million voters and there would be mistakes here and there, the whole world will have the same problem … there is no perfect electoral list in the world,” Abdul Aziz had said.
“All that’s happened was not planned by the EC. The EC will not simply allow voters to vote twice. Sometimes, it goes wrong during the profiling (by JPN). We will check if it’s in the wrong place, if so, we will throw it out,” Abdul Aziz said amid a backlash from evidence presented by the opposition such as registered foreign voters, overlapping names, phantom voters and names of voters not present on the JPN list.
“EC’s confession is clear why Bersih 2.0 was held, and now people are seeing its results,” said Tuan Ibrahim, who is also Pahang PAS commissioner.
He added that although the EC and Umno continue to portray the Bersih 2.0 rally negatively, people have started to open their eyes and see how dirty the election system is with thousands of foreigners given voting rights so easily.
