It takes 3 months to gazzette the Sept roll-but only less than 1 month for Batu Sapi roll!

The Batu Sapi by-election used a voters roll updated to Oct 9th-less than 1 month ahead of the Nov 4th poll. They could gazet the new roll that fast-while the quarterly roll from July-Sept took 3 months(see report below). Wonder what account for the super fast speed when an election come along. Did the EC made any shortcut to gazette the roll? Since gazetting involving clearing lots of objections(despite a fine of RM10.00 for objection of each voter) wonder how the EC clear these new voters when an election come knocking on the door? Did these objections all dissappear in time or that the roll was bulldozed through the gazetting process? If they can do it faster when election come -why not make it a regular way to speed up the process to reduce the time needed for new applicants to wait for their voting status?

Sebanyak 177,857 permohonan pengundi baru telah didaftarkan bagi tempoh Julai hingga 30 Sept lalu mengikut Daftar Pemilih Tambahan (DPT) Suku Ketiga 2010 yang diwartakan semalam.

NONESuruhanjaya Pilihan Raya (SPR) berkata DPT itu mengandungi 205,183 pemilih, termasuk 27,326 permohonan pertukaran alamat pusat mengundi.

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285 new voters confirmed registered from Sarawak Road Shows!

Road Show volunteer Wai Fong working hard to register an otherwise disenfranchised old woman in Long Sg Dua, Ulu Baram

The voter registration campaign through the monthly Sarawak Road Show almost came to a halt after July when it was found that less than 10% of  its application forms submitted through PKR or SADIA was approved! Where have the forms gone and why the low approval rate where elsewhere the rejection rate is about 10%? Many visits to the EC offices in Putrajya and Kuching later-which spanned 4 months, the first batch of the voters are finally approved-numbering 285, out of 352 checked! This is the first time that the Road Show can claimed to have help register the 1st interior Sarawakian as a voter where they are usually shun by all parties for voter registration exercise due to the huge distances involved in traveling there. So what took so long for their registration?

Many factors are involved -may be an example may suffice to illustrate the problems:

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Overseas Malaysians denied their right to vote

Malaysians who are overseas during elections have been denied their voting rights for decades now-so the time for a campaign to secure their Consttutionally guaranteed rights is timely:

Ratusan ribu rakyat Malaysia yang tinggal di luar negara yang dihalang mengundi pada setiap kali pilihan raya umum didakan sejak tahun 2002 mendakwa undang-undang negara sedia ada mendiskriminasikan mereka.

Mengikut Akta Pilihan Raya, di mana Suruhanjaya Pilihan Raya (SPR) beroperasi, – hanya empat kategori rakyat layak membuang undi pos.

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BN blamed Anwar for not implementing automatic voter registration

Automatic registration of voters will enfranchise 4mil citizens and save RM200mil over. There is no 1 measure that the government can take that has such efficiency! So indeed, why does the govt not do it? Blaming Anwar has been used to evade the issue.

Still no to automatic voter registration, says Putrajaya

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal

October 26, 2010

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 26 — The Najib Administration maintained today that it would not implement an automatic registration system for voters, saying that ultimately it was entirely up to Malaysians whether they wanted to vote.

Minister in the Prime Minister’s department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz said today that enforcing automatic registration would be too “complicated” and might affect the percentage of voters in a general election.

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1 mil overseas Malaysians denied their voting rights while EC take sweet time to amend rules

Statutory Amendment Proposed to Allow Citizens Overseas to Vote by Postal Ballot

ARCHIVES 2010
Friday, 08 October 2010

Translated into English by Sim Tze Wei, Oriental Daily

The Malaysian Election Commission is not neglecting the voting rights of a million Malaysians residing overseas, but is actively studying ways to amend the Elections (Registration of Electors) Regulations 2002 to make such persons entitled to postal votes.

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Voter registration rate up in anticipation of general elections?

October 28, 2010 16:44 PM

There are about half a million of new voters each year-so if there are a quarter million of voters registered each quarter we are doing well to cover the natural voter growth. However this rate of voter registration only occur when elections fever is catching up. So the rate we have now is not the average for all the years between elections. Another issue: the registrations are not evenly distributed in the country-with less in rural/interior areas eg in Sabah & Sarawak. We will keep you informed if the about 1000 voters forms submitted to EC till June this year have been processed. ur last check shows less than 10% of them being approved. Even the 10% could be due to previous application!

246,962 Register As Voters

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 (Bernama) — A total of 246,962 people have registered as new voters from July to September this year.

The Election Commission said in a statement today that 32,494 present voters applied to change their polling station.

The Additional Electoral Rolls for the third quarter of 2010 will be displayed from Oct 27 to Nov 2.

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EC spend Rm13.00 to register each new voter-where is efficiency?

According to latest figures from the Parliament Election Commission spent Rm13.00 to register each voter! This is much higher than the RM4.50 spent previously. The EC spent overall Rm2.22mil last year to register 161148 new voters, leaving 4.3mil eligible citizens unregistered, or 27.4%. In contrast to the EC Assistant Registrars only are given Rm1.00 to register each new voter-so why is the EC not appoint more Assistant Registrars-especially from among the willing and able civil society members?

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Pakatan triumph over BN…in voter registrations

The tension  of election is keeping voter registration to peak -over 300 000 new registrations is achieved in the first half of 2010, according to EC’s figures. This is over the natural voter growth at about 500 000 a year. Congratulations! However the distribution of the registrations has not been disclosed. We believe that the registrations would concentrate in urban areas where the bulk of the populations is-which make registration easier. The interior areas especially in Sabah and Sarawak will continue to be neglected and disenfranchised! Unless the NGo and political parties sit up to tackle this our democracy will be paralysed in the interior where over half the populations are not registered. Representative democracy cannot gain credibility if this state of affairs continue beyond this half a century of nationhood! 301,653 pemilih baru didaftar

Sep 13, 10 10:19am

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Voter registration race gather steam-total voters now at 11.4mil!

Unfortunately there are no further details about the breakdown of the newly gazetted voters-we’ll look out on it.

SPR: Jumlah pemilih berdaftar naik 11.4 juta
Sep 1, 10 2:47pm
(malaysiakini)
Jumlah pemilih berdaftar di seluruh negara kini meningkat kepada 11,381,193 orang dengan pewartaan daftar pemilih tambahan (DPT) suku kedua tahun ini yang mengandungi 191,970 pemilih, hari ini.

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EC’s strategy to slow voter registration-piecing the jigsaw together now

Sarawak Road Show's July volunteer Joshua, an insurance agent, and wife ventured up river from Tatau to register 120 new voters -why can't the willing and able civil society members like this be given voter registration forms to help register more voters?

The EC or SPR has a strange strategy for voter registration which escape most people’s attention: the plan unfolds over such a long time and scattered all over the place such that it is easy for the unfocused observer to miss it completely! This is an attempt to piece the almost Machiavellian plan together for the readers’ interests:

Firstly the EC openly admitted its failure to register close to 5 million eligible citizens as voters. It is disarming to hear that except for those who remember the same being repeated  for umpteen time before! Of that Sarawak, with close to half a million unregistered citizens or 33.8% of unregistered eligible citizens, has the lowest among all states-excluding the Federal territories. Of course the official figures do not look closer at more than half of interior citizens who are not registered as voters.

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