Serious flaws in Ledang electoral roll

Johor DAP has claimed to have found thousands of registered voters in the Ledang parliamentary constituency who have either incomplete or no information at all in the databases of the Election Commission (EC) and National Registration Department (NRD).

They include 417 voters whose names are missing from the NRD database.

This latest flaw was exposed at a press conference called in Muar today by Bakri MP Er Teck Hwa(centre in photo), who was accompanied by Johor DAP secretary Tan Chen Choon and Youth leader Ee Chin Li.

They said a 17-member task force formed by the party had detected several flaws in the electoral roll of Ledang, a semi-rural constituency with some 60,000 voters:

• A total of 1,824 voters have no record in the online database of both the EC and NRD.
• A voter is listed as a permanent resident in the NRD database.
• A total of 2,195 voters have no address in the EC's database.
• The addresses of 35,064 or 59.14 percent of the voters in the electoral roll are incomplete.
• A total of 417 voters have only MyKad numbers listed in the NRD database - without names.
• A total of 6,700 voters have no record in the NRD database. They are listed as 'no application' and 'invalid number'.

Ee said these problems raised serious questions about national security.

"Why is a permanent resident given voting rights? How many permanent residents have been registered as voters, and how many times have they voted? How did the EC determine the constituencies of voters who don't have addresses?" he asked.

In a previous complaint, PAS had found some 1,000 permanent residents on the roll, which the NRD and EC clarified was due to"technical negligence".

EC chairperson Abdul Aziz Yusof had said then that the NRD had neglected to update its database to show that these permanent residents had been granted citizenship.

'Horrible blunder'

Ee was particularly scathing on cases of voters whose names were missing from the NRD database, describing this as a "horrible blunder" that the EC is obliged to explain.

"The NRD website showed their status as 'MyKad has been collected'. Does it mean they collect their Mykad first and fill in their names later? How the EC can register voters with only the MyKad number but without their name into the electoral roll?"

Ee expressed worry that the 6,700 voters with no record in NRD database could be a fatal loophole in national security, and called on the Home Ministry to answer for this.

He also dismissed the argument by Abdul Aziz that errors in the electoral roll represent just 0.0001 percent of the total 12.4 million registered voters.

"Every single vote is indispensable. How can the EC view voters as a set of numbers? As citizen, every voter has voting rights that cannot be compromised."

The task force would continue to scrutinise other constituencies in the Johor, Ee added.