Results of the Election Commission's voter registration drive in 2009 were dismally low and more than four million Malaysians over the voting age remain unregistered, said Serdang MP Teo Nie Ching.

teo nie ching uncensored 120908 01 In a statement today, Teo ( left ) said that high number of unregistered voters showed that the EC's performance was "unsatisfactory".

"According to the 2009 Annual Report of the EC, only 279,490 new voters were registered last year. With more than 4.3 million eligible voters yet to be registered, the number of new voters registered in 2009 is extremely small at only 6.5 percent.

"I am not sure how our prime minister and the KPI minister would rate the EC, but to me they have failed at fulfilling their KPI," said Teo.

She added that the low numbers were unacceptable given that the government had allocated RM726,000 under Budget 2009 and another RM1.5 million under the second supplementary budget of 2009.

With a combined budget of RM2.226 million along with the 5,635 outreach programmes that have been conducted, Teo points out that the EC only registered 161,148 and should have done better.

"A simple calculation would show that EC was spending RM13.81 to register a new voter while for the assistant registrars appointed by political parties, EC is only paying them RM1 for each successfully registered voter.

"As we are looking at 4.3 million unregistered voters, it is going to cost us taxpayers RM59,461,390 to register all unregistered voters in Malaysia at this rate," she said.

Automatic voter registration

Teo said that should EC fail to improve in terms of efficiency, the federal government can implement an automatic voter registration system.

"Automatic voter registration has been implemented in many countries such as Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Taiwan and many more.

"With the national registration department holding all the details such as date of birth, IC number and address of each and every Malaysian, there is no good reason why automatic voter registration cannot be implemented in Malaysia," she said.

Teo said that such a move cannot be misunderstood as a move to force individuals to vote, as seen in Brazil, Australia and Chile, but only as simplifying the process of registering voters.