The Election Commission should first produce a clean and comprehensive electoral list and prove its ability to conduct "free, fair and clean elections" before planning for electronic voting, urged DAP national chairperson Lim Kit Siang today.

He said it was premature to plan for e-voting in Malaysia because of the absence of political prerequisites and conditions.

"If the EC is capable of producing a clean list and to conduct free, fair and clean elections, then Malaysia is ready to introduce e-voting even for the general election.

"Otherwise, it is ridiculous and laughable for the EC to tinker with proposals of e-voting," he said in a statement.



He was responding to Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's statement Monday, after a working visit to the EC headquarters, that the country will in time adopt e-voting system to facilitate the election process.

Introduce sign up o­n-line

Lim said instead of implementing e-voting, the EC should introduce an electronic voter registration system which is common in many countries to enable their citizens to sign up as voters o­nline.

He also said Mahathir's statement that the government had yet to decide whether e-voting will be adopted soon had illustrated the biggest weakness of the EC.

"(This confirmed) its total lack of autonomoy and independence in the discharge of its constitutional mandate to conduct elections, which is not beholden to the ruling government of the day, with full and untrammeled powers to decide o­n the mechanism of the electoral system," he said.

On a related matter, he said he was surprised that Mahathir did not pursue at his working visit to the EC his previous allegation of phantom voters o­n the electoral list.

The premier had said last November that some 2.8 million or 30 percent of registered voters have had their names transferred unwittingly by certain parties to other constituencies, adding that this had been going o­n for probably over 30 years.

Proof submitted?

Lim questioned if the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition had submitted proof o­n this allegation to the EC since Mahathir's deputy Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had announced last year that they would do so.

The DAP leader added that the public needed to know that if there was any basis in the allegation and if so, what actions had been taken by the EC to purge the phantom voters from the electoral roll.

"Or was Mahathir and Abdullah's allegation completely false and baseless and if so, are they prepared to publicly retract their allegation," he asked.

He also expressed dissatisfaction at the the rate of voter registration in the country since the EC introduced a round-the-year-registration system last year.

Better registration system

"Last July, the EC announced that 2.1 million Malaysians had attained eligibility to register as voters but o­nly some 100,000 new voters had registered since then, excluding over 20,000 applications from existing voters for change of addresses.

"This is less than five percent of the eligible voters as of last July, without taking into account the new increase of eligible voters since then," he said.

He urged the EC to devise a better system which is able to register at least 90 percent of these new eligible voters ahead of the next national poll.