’42,000 dubious voters is not insignificant’

Bersih criticised the EC and presented its own analysis where 42,000 dubious voters could potentially play a significant role in who rules the country.

KUALA LUMPUR: Polls watchdog Bersih 3.0 took the Election Commission (EC) to task for saying that 42 000 “dubious voters” in the electoral list does not make the entire roll dirty.

Bersih steering committee member, Wong Chin Huat, said that the Barisan National’s (BN) win in the 2008 election was so vulnerable that should 42,000 phantom voters be inserted into specific marginal seats, it could have resulted in a BN victory, but it would have been an unfair election.

To prove his point, Wong highlighted two scenarios today using the influx of the 42,000 “phantom voters”.

Nationally, he said that the BN would still retain its majority but this would be razor-thin.

In the highly contested state of Selangor, BN could take the state with a 39-seat majority.

“Their victory was be so vulnerable [previously] that the phantom voters could have saved BN,” he said.

In the case of Selangor, he focused on seats which BN had lost with a weak majority.

There were 19 such seats including Sekinchan, Bukit Melawati, Ijok and Sejangkang.

He said that 41,459 “phantom voters” distributed to these seats which BN lost, would mean a change of government, provided that all the “phantom voters” picked BN.

Pakatan now holds power in the state. It has 36 out of 56 seats.

41 cities worldwide to rally

Nationally, Wong focused on seats which BN had won with a weak majority. There were 25 such seats including Sarikei (in Sarawak), Sandakan (in Sabah), Lumut and Alor Setar.

“Assuming that 41,653 voters were phantom voters who contributed to the BN victory in these 25 seats in 2008, removing these voters would reduce BN’s win to a simple majority of 115 seats,” he said.

BN now holds 137 out of 222 parliamentary seats.

“Saying that 0.3 is insignificant is to say that in every 100 operations, three deaths occur on medical terms. Is that not significant?” he asked.

Yesterday EC chairman Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof defended the voter roll and asked for its critics to be fair to the electoral body.

He said that no electoral roll in any country is 100% clean and argued that 0.3 percent or 42,051 dubious voters in the list of 12.6 million voters were not as significant as some critics have made it out to be.

“The point is not just these 42,000 dubious voters. There are many more problems; we just want to show that these number are indeed significant,” he said.

Also present was Bersih co-chairperson, S Ambiga who said that Bersih has officially written to the police and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL) to discuss the sit-in protest at Dataran Merdeka on April 28.

“We are ready to meet and discuss the gathering,” she said.

She also launched Bersih’s global website today (www.globalbersih.org) which will be the main source to coordinate the electoral watchdog’s simultaneous international gatherings on April 28.

So far, 41 cities have pledged their solidarity to the cause.