58k 'M'sian-born foreigners' found on electoral roll

Aidila Razak 4:32PM Oct 11, 2012

The Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) has found about 65,000 ‘foreigners’ on the electoral roll gazetted for the third quarter of 2011.

Defining ‘foreigners’ as those who are recorded by the Election Commission (EC) as having a race foreign to Malaysia, Merap found that about 58,000 or a whopping 90 percent of these voters were born in Malaysia.

Of that 58,000, 97 percent or 49,000 are voting in Sabah.

“You may think that these people are those born out of Malaysia who have obtained citizenship, but according to their identity cards, about 58,000 of them were born in Malaysia.

“It is very unlikely to meet a Malaysian-born Italian, British, Maltese or Burmese,” Merap head researcher Ong Kian Ming said today.
The study also found the following irregularities, or “suspicious” cases:

• Voters who are above 85 years old, with more than 1,000 people aged above 100 years found. One woman in Terengganu, registered in the second quarter of 2012, is aged 101 years;

• Multiple voters with the same name and same date of birth, who are registered as voters in the same parliamentary and state consituencies;

• One pair sharing the same name and date of birth is found to be voters in the same state and parliamentary constituencies in Sabah, One was born in Malacca and the other in Johor;

• A total of 233 pairs of voters share the same old identity card numbers, but different new MyKad numbers. There are also cases of old identity card numbers “transferred” to new voters;

• Genders of 15,000 people on the electoral roll do not match the codes denoting gender on their identity cards;

• Multiple voters are registered at a single address.One address in Klang has 46 voters of various races registered there. The home owner informed the researchers that strangers claiming to be living in a squatter area near there “borrowed” his address to register, but they have all moved away; and

• Another 116,000 voters in the fourth quarter of 2010 have “magically appeared” on the roll, without going through the gazetting process in the previous quarters.

Fraud or typo errors?
Ong said he could not say whether these cases arose from fraud or were merely administrative issues or typographical errors.

“I don't really know (if it is fraud), and this is only a partial study of 13 million names. Some could be administrative errors, but they are important administrative errors,” he said.

For example, Ong said, misrecording someone's gender could lead to the person being unable to vote as his or her physical identity would not match what is stated on the electoral roll.

“If the electoral roll says someone is female, and the person is clearly male, people can object to him entering the polling station. That's a problem the EC needs to look at,” he said.

Ong, who recently joined the DAP, was presenting his findings at a briefing for parliamentarians and the media, which was supported by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, Bersih.