“The Election Commission’s (EC) hands are tied and their pants are lowered,” joked Selangor MB Abdul Khalid Ibrahim at an international forum on GE13 in Kuala Lumpur this morning.

He was commenting on the EC’s helpless reaction to 134,675 unidentified voters out of the nearly 500,000 new voters in Selangor since 2008, roughly 28 percent of the total addition to the state’s electoral roll.

The nearly 140,000 unidentified voters were sussed out by Khalid’s state-sponsored initiative to detect irregularities in Selangor’s voter rolls.

NONE “We wrote a letter to the Election Commission offering help to clean the electoral roll, but we were told that it is not the Selangor government’s duty to do so,” Khalid ( left ) said.

He described how the EC parroted its stock reply that it does not have the power to verify or take out those voters as only individual voters can rectify any irregularities in their records.

To date, the EC, federal ministers and Selangor Umno deputy chief Noh Omar have been resistant to the state’s efforts to verify its electoral roll.

Delivering the opening speech at the forum organised by the office of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, Khalid explained that using just the resources of the state to avoid political entanglements with partisan interests, he had managed to trace the new voters and verify them to their phone numbers and addresses, except for those with irregularities that he fears may be phantom voters.

Such a process, he said, can also be used by the EC to rigorously clean the electoral roll if only the commission would listen to Selangor or take a page from how it is weeding out questionable voters.

The Malaysian electoral roll is notorious for irregularities, through the EC has defended this as being the norm in even developed countries, as no system is truly perfect.

The opposition and civil society, however, remain far from convinced as day in and day out more and more irregular voters, false registrations and even foreign citizens are found to populate our voter lists.