Over 28,000 'foreign' voters on electoral roll

There are at least 28,593 voters of foreign origin on the electoral roll, most of them concentrated in the hot states of Selangor and Sabah, said the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap).

This is the sum of all persons who have registered as voters in the 2012 fourth quarter electoral roll, and had identified themselves as from one of four countries in the registration forms.

These Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, and Pakistan - all which are main sources of migrant labour for Malaysia.

Sabah has the most, with 55.6 percent, while Selangor has 15.1 percent.

The other states have a much lower proportion, ranging from 6.2 percent in Kuala Lumpur to 0.1 percent in Putrajaya.

Sabah’s neighbour Sarawak has only 1.1 percent of such voters.

“Very surprisingly, when you look at their (MyKad) numbers, most of them (80 percent) are given the Malaysian ‘state code’, meaning that according to the document, they were born in Malaysia," said Merap research assistant Lee Wee Tak (right).

“Unsurprisingly, the bulk of these carry the state code of Sabah, meaning that these Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indonesians were all born in Sabah.

“So how many Filipinos were actually born in Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Kota Kinabalu’s main hospital)?” he said, raising the possibility that the electoral roll had been tampered with.

Sabah has been the focus of a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) over allegations of a citizenship-for-votes scheme around the early 1990s, purportedly to skew the demographics in favour of BN.

However, the RCI proceedings were suspended in wake of the Lahad Datu incursion.

Single-name voters

Lee said there are also people on the electoral roll who had come from other countries, such as Botswana and Macedonia.

In addition, the group has found 185 persons identifying themselves as Malays but with unusual names that do not include the name of their father.

Examples of these single-word names include ‘Armeyanto’, ‘Suwanto’, ‘Jamal’ and ‘Abdullah’.
 
“I don’t think a Malay would call himself that. It is like kacang lupakan kulit,” he said, using a pejorative Malay idiom that means ‘to forget one’s roots’.