EC: Bersih has no right to demand our resignation

The Election Commission (EC) will not give in to the resignation demand of Bersih 2.0 because the irregularities in the electoral roll the electoral reform coalition revealed yesterday are just "technical issues", commission deputy chairperson Wan Ahmad Wan Omar says.

"Who is Bersih 2.0 to have the power to demand the EC panel to resign? They are an unregistered NGO. It is useless to call for a press conference because the main issue of electoral roll involves technical matters,"  mStar quotes Wan Ahmad (right) as saying.

mStar is the online Malay edition of English daily The Star.

Wan Ahmad told the news portal that electoral reform coalition Bersih 2.0 has no power to raise such a demand because the EC is appointed by the Yang d-Pertuan Agong, as stipulated by the federal constitution.

EC calls for discussion

If Bersih 2.0 is committed to free and fair elections, he said, the group should submit and discuss the evidence of electoral irregularities with the EC.

"We ask them to come to the EC office, bring evidence and we will give explanation as to why such problems happened.

"They don't understand the constraints that we are facing which give rise to such technical problems," mStar quotes him as saying.

Wan Ahmad reiterated that the EC is willing to discuss with Bersih 2.0  how to solve the issue of electoral roll problems, even though the coalition is not legally registered.

He said the discussion door is still open for Bersih 2.0 and the coalition should not force the people to be involved in its April 28 rally.

'Bersih out to create chaos'

Bersih, he said, was behaving if it has lost its direction, and seemed to be fighting for certain agenda "to create chaos in the country".

Yesterday, Bersih 2.0 repeated its call for all election commissioners to step down for failing to clean up the electoral roll.

Besides the 400,000 dubious voter names discovered by the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) headed by political researcher Ong Kian Ming, the coalition said, it has unearthed more instances of fraud in the roll.

It claimed that 24,105 voters in Sabah and Sarawak have been re-registered in Selangor, causing double entries in the electoral roll.