PAS kicks up a stink over updated electoral rolls
The Election Commission has created a new category of voters and PAS is smelling something fishy over the move.
The Election Commission has created a new category of voters and PAS is smelling something fishy over the move.
The category is called "losing the right to vote as civilians", and PAS claimed that as many as 18,493 voters have been converted to postal voters.
The opposition party is questioning the EC's move to hastily approve the electoral roll for the third quarter of 2010, which include the mysterious new category of voters.
PAS Youth information chief Suhaizan Kaiat (right) said in a statement today that this new category was only established in the third quarter of this year, and this raised several questions since normally a postal voter does not have the right to vote as a civilian.
According to him, the 18,493 voters struck off as civilian voters are now classified as postal voters.
Suhaizan said the number of 18,493 voters losing the right to vote as civilians was huge, compared with the 76 who applied to be registered as postal voters.
The 18,493 new postal voters, he figured, could be the spouses of the policemen or army personnel and their family members.
"However, as there are only 76 new postal voters recorded, this brings to question whether this means that each police or army personnel who registered (as a postal voter during this period) has a family of 243 members.
"This is truly an unrealistic figure and suspicious, since there is a sudden rise in this registration."
Suhaizan added: "This rise in registration in the third quarter, as the 13th general election approaches, raises questions.
"It is as if there is a last-minute effort to ensure the victory of certain parties.
"There is also evidence of wives of security personnel not knowing that their names had been transferred from civilian voters to postal voters. They are victims of unscrupulous people."
He said this new group of voters losing their rights to vote as civilians only came about in the electoral roll for the third quarter of this year, as there had been no such group during the past 12 general elections.
This certainly made the emergence of this category, and its huge number, questionable.
Kelantan, Kedah and Perak have the highest
To add more to the mystery, Suhaizan said, the largest number in this questionable group are in Kelantan (3,187 voters), Kedah (2,876) and Perak (2,007).
"The irony is that two of these states are governed by Pakatan Rakyat, while the other fell to the Barisan Nasional through questionable democratic means. The win by Pakatan, albeit by a small majority in some state constituencies, was worrying to the coalition.
"Using the Jeniri state seat in Kedah, as an example, Pakatan's Yahya Abdullah won by 67 votes. The new category of those who lost their the rights to vote as civilians in that constituency is 117.
"So, will it result in the Pakatan candidate losing by 50 votes next time around?" he asked.
Suhaizan said the EC had yet to rectify its weaknesses in the postal voting system, as its chairperson Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof (left) has realised that registering postal voters is difficult, and the that procedure involved the filling in of a lot of forms.
"Abdul Aziz had promised to change the postal voting system. However, we do not know the status of his proposal.
"The existence of the category 'losing right as civilian voters' has increased the number of postal votes, and has not addressed the weaknesses. This may lead to manipulation of election results," he said
To ensure justice and transparency, Suhaizan added, the EC should explain the questions arising as result of this new category.
The opposition has raised the issue of postal voters time and again as they claimed such voters could be deployed in marginal seats to give the ruling BN the edge.
