Bersih shows how a voter can be 'cloned'

In the run-up to the announcement of Bersih 3.0, steering committee member and political scientist Wong Chin Huat revealed more instances of “cloned” voters, which he alleged were phantom voters.

Using the 2011 fourth quarter electoral roll, Wong (left) explained four methods voters could be registered multiple times, so that they could cast votes several times.

“You can find that we have achieved so much in cloning technologies that we would beat the Koreans and all others in the world,” the Monash University lecturer sarcastically remarked.

The four methods are:

• Voters having the same old Identity Card (IC) number and address, but different new IC numbers;

• Voters having the same name, but slightly different new IC numbers;

• Same name, with slightly different dates of birth, and new IC numbers; and

• Postal voters with the same name but slightly different IC numbers.

Wong gave 10 examples of possible “cloned” voters and said there were at least 560 instances of “clones” of the first type.

However, he said, he did not know how many “clones” there were in the other three categories, pointing out that the research he had done was “just the tip of the iceberg”.

In one example of voters having the same old IC number and same address, he showed the capture of a screenshot from the Election Commission’s (EC) electoral roll verification website 

It shows one Suodah Salleh and Teh Boon Keat having the same old IC number and the same address in Subang Jaya, Selangor (as seen above).

Wong also showed four instances of voters having the same name but different IC numbers, including two persons named Mok Sow Ying. Their ICs indicated that they have the same birth date, but their IC numbers differed in two digits, while the other details were also different.

One Mok is registered to vote in Petaling Jaya Utara, Selangor, and the other is in Pandan, Selangor.

“Can someone tell me how much coincidence you need for two persons to be born on the same day, with the same name, but the IC numbers are different by 400?” Wong asked, referring to the third last digit of the two ICs numbers that was different.

In the third type, he showed two screenshots of two persons named Liew Siew Lee who had different years of birth, but the rest of the IC numbers were the same, and the other details such as voting places were different.

In the last method, Wong showed examples of  two soldiers with the same name, Azhar bin Ahmad (above), but with their military identity card numbers differing only in the last digit, by one. They were assigned to different army camps – one in Bandar Tun Razak, and the other in Wangsa Maju.

“We need to know if this is not fraud, someone should step forward and show us the registration forms,” he said.

After Wong’s presentation, UCSI University lecturer and political scientist Ong Kian Ming presented some of the preliminary findings of his Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project, which showed additional discrepancies in postal voters.

Ong (left) said there were more than 200,000 postal voters distributed in a “selected number” of constituencies, some of which are considered “marginal seats” where the election results could swing either way.

He listed five problems affecting postal voters, with these examples:

• Postal voters registered with regular ICs in addition to their military identity cards;

• Spouses of police officers who are registered as postal voters, even though only spouses of military personnel are eligible;

• Spouses of military and police voters of the same gender;

• Military and police voters above the retirement age, including one Wan Rasidy Roni who is 112 years old; and

• New military and police voters above the recruitment age.

“I’m not saying that all the flaws I’m showing are necessarily phantom voters, but I think they are serious enough for the EC, as well as the National Registration Department, to explain these very serious discrepancies,” Ong said.

He also pointed out that the parliamentary select committee (PSC) on Electoral Reform had looked for duplicate entries of new IC numbers, but not old IC numbers and not among postal voters.

Bersih 2.0 steering committee co-chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan said that the academicians were invited to speak to reveal the problems in the electoral roll.

“We wanted to establish that one of the main reasons Bersih 3.0 is happening is that while the PSC was busily working on its report, the fraud was going on,” she said, expressing disappointment that the PSC had not adequately addressed the issue of electoral fraud.