Klang MP: Dubious voters to face citizen's arrest

Dubious voters found to have participated in electoral fraud in the Klang parliamentary constituency in tomorrow’s polls will be subjected to citizen’s arrest.

Incumbent MP Charles Santiago said he has to take matters into his own hands as he and his team have marked at least 2,000 questionable voters in the Klang electoral roll.

Five hundred and seventy one of those voters are already on the dubious voters list from the Sabah royal commission of inquiry (RCI) into illegal voters.

Santiago said as a formality, the list of all these voters will be sent to the Election Commission (EC) but he does not expect the EC to act on the list.

"They won't act on it because the law says they can't cancel out names from a gazetted electoral roll," he told Malaysiakini today when contacted.

As such, the names will also be given to all of the polling agents from Santiago's team, who intends to conduct citizen’s arrest if they manage to find anyone from these lists turning up to vote.

"We have spoken to our lawyers and they have told us that we should go ahead with the citizen’s arrests first," he said.

Pay per vote scam?

He also urged factory operators in Klang "not to cede in" in allowing their foreign workers to vote tomorrow, after receiving information that some foreign factory workers were allegedly being offered RM500 per head to vote for BN.

"I have received a call from a factory yesterday, informing that their (foreign) workers have been asked to vote for BN and will be given RM500 each.

“These workers were asked to report to a certain location at 7am tomorrow, though I am not sure where that location is," he said.

Santiago said that he is now trying to verify the allegations with the relevant factories’ association in Klang and will try to speak to the factory owners to dissuade their workers from taking up the offers.

He has raised numerous complaints with the EC regarding alleged fraudulent voter registration exercises, which he said are quite high in his constituency, to no avail.

In March his application for a judicial review of the Klang electoral roll was dismissed on the grounds of the controversial Section 9A of the Elections Act 1958.

The section was introduced by the BN government in 2001 after a landmark 2001 case overturned the 1999 Likas election results over a tainted electoral roll.

Legal cover-up

Bersih has criticised the section, that bars the courts from scrutinising the electoral roll, as an attempt to cover up irregularities in the electoral roll.

The DAP incumbent is defending the Klang seat against MCA's The Kim Poo, having defeated Ch'ng Toh Eng with a comfortable 17,701 vote majority in the last elections.

Klang has an increase of about 20,000 new voters, from 77,816 registered voters in 2008 to 97,252 eligible voters tomorrow.

The Chinese are the majority constituents, making up 46 percent of the electorate, followed by Malays at 32 percent, and Indians at 20 percent.

However in the run-up to polling day there have been concerns that these numbers may be bolstered by planeloads of foreigners allegedly being flown in from outside the state.