Prove claims, Anwar told

WILD ALLEGATIONS: Give us list of suspect postal voters, says election panel

(NST) - THE Election Commission yesterday asked Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to back his claims that the postal voters' roll was questionable.

The opposition leader had claimed that the 304,136 names in the list, which was gazetted in June, were suspect.

"The thing is, there are only 272,247 names listed as postal voters... which electoral role did he cross-check with?" EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof asked at a news conference here.

Aziz said the EC also had issues with several other claims it said were wild allegations.

These included claims that there were 64,000 suspect postal voters included on April 9, 2010; there were 77,246 new voters excluded from the 2008 electoral roll; there were 2,522 suspect names of members of the armed forces and the police; there were 4.38 million voters without addresses while 3.3 million more only had house numbers; and that localities in Selangor were reduced to 13,813 from 24,479.

On the 77,246 names that are now in the electoral roll, Aziz explained that when a person registered as a voter, it did not mean that he would automatically be eligible to vote. Instead, his application would go through the due processes including the setting of locality, displaying of his application for any protest, and possible public inquiry.

He also asked Anwar to hand over the sets of 64,000 and 77,246 names that had been called into question.

On the 2,522 armed forces and police personnel whose names were not matched to their MyKad, Aziz said the EC was in the midst of matching their names to the identification documents.

He said in the coming general election, the EC would be using their 12-digit identification number as in their MyKad.

On the issue of questionable addresses, he said prior July 16, 2002, those who were above 21 could provide any addresses as the EC did not have the facilities to verify them. Since then, with the Agency Link-up System, addresses given to the EC by the applicants had to match their MyKad.

Meanwhile, the shrinking number of localities in Selangor was due to sub-divisions carried out in 2009, June 2010, and twice last year, Aziz said.

He said the EC had gone to great lengths to investigate claims, even those described as absurd, such as the allegation by Solidariti Anak Muda Malaysia (SAMM) that anyone could register as voters using a fake MyKad.