The Election Commission (EC) has just announced that they have received a total of 40,715 applications for registration as voters during the voter registration exercise for the second quarter of this year from April up to June 2014. Of the total, 31,998 applications were for registration of new voters while 8,717 others were for a change of address in the voting centre. The first quarter of 2014 saw only 11,565 of new voters were registered.

In the first quarter of 2013, there were 104,959 newly registered voters, and this number was reduced to 49,789 in the second quarter, when the 13th general election (GE13) was held. It worsened to 18,693 and 21,754 in the third and final quarters of 2013, respectively.

The causes of the significant drop in new registered voters may be due to:

1) Cooling down after the exciting GE13 in May 2013;

2) Discontinuing the appointment of Assistant Registration Officers (AROs) from political parties; and

3) Few registration drives for new voters had been initiated by the EC.

Many political parties, NGOs and individuals have voiced out their concerns on the growing number of unregistered eligible voters either by writing to the EC directly or via social media and even the main stream media. Despite all these efforts by varies parties, the EC has yet to come out with any solid plan to overcome this growing concern.

The EC had given the reason in October 2013 that they are reviewing the current channels of registration of new voters. But now it is already August 2014, a good 10 months have gone by, and the EC has not come forward with a cost-efficient way of registering new voters.

Various politicians as well as NGOs have spoken of the need to implement automatic voters’ registration to overcome the 5 million eligible voters as well as sharing of data base between the National Registration Department and the EC so as to reduce the incidents of double registration, outdated residential address, deceased voters still in the roll, non-citizens in the roll etc.. All these seemed to have landed on deaf ears.

Still a long way to go for automatic voter registration

Najib Abdul Razak told the Parliament on June 25 that the government will consider registering voters automatically but shot down any hope of compulsory voting being considered by his administration.

However, on June 30, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Shahidan Kassim hinted that automatic voters registration is still a long way to go before implementation when he said that until such in-depth study is done, the government has no plan to implement automatic voter registration in his reply to Senator Syed Ibrahim Kader who asked about the government’s stand on the proposal for automatic voter registration of citizens who reach 21 years old.

Both the PM’s as well as Shahidan Kassim’s statements did not in any way indicate a strong commitment from the government to implement automatic voter registration any time soon since the PM has said that the government will consider, but has not given a time frame as to when the consideration will begin and end whereas, Shahidan, on the other hand, said that an in-depth study must be done first before considering without yet again giving any indication as to whether the study has begun, who is in charge of conducting the in-depth study, and when the study must end.

One can safely predict that automatic voters’ registration will not be implemented before the 14th

general election and the reasons are obvious. New voters are Internet-savvy and they can access to news from all sources which allow them to better judge the actions and words of any politician.

This could only be the reason as to why the BN’s administration and the EC had suspended the appointment of AROs from political parties and are dragging their feet to improve on the system of registering the 5 million eligible voters which may very well end BN’s 57 years reign.

If the suspicion of a conspiracy between the BN’s administration and the EC is not true, the EC should do the following to dispel suspicion:

1) Re-appoint AROs from political parties or NGOs;

2) Launch nationwide door-to-door campaign in the outskirts to register new voters;

3) Launch nationwide advertising campaign to invite eligible voters to register at the post offices, Do’s offices, the EC’s offices and at the registration booths set-up at specific places at certain dates; and

4) Introduce e-Daftar and e-Tukar on the EC’s websites to allow for the convenience of eligible voters to register as voters as well as allowing the existing voters to change their address in the voting centre.

STEVEN CHOONG is national deputy secretary-general of PKR.