Both BN and Pakatan Rakyat politicians agreed that there is a need for automatic voter registration.

NONE While also championing lowering the voting age to 18, Deputy Higher Education Minister Saifuddin Abdullah ( left ) said that making voter registration automatic is more pressing.

“Automatic voter registration itself can save elections commission from the problems in registering new voters,” he said at a forum titled ‘Voter Registration: Should it Be Compulsory?’.

Echoing PKR vice-president and Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh, Saifuddin also said that it was high time for Malaysia to follow in the footsteps of UK, where voters are registered automatically and they are routinely sent forms to update their statuses.

“This will do away with issues of what happens when the voters move, and the Elections Commission (EC) can also save money from having to go on roadshows or set up booths. We might as well use the money to educate voters on how to vote,” he said.

“I’m sure our infrastructure can accommodate. We already have a law that says that we need to change our address in the MyKad every time we move, so linking that system with the ones from the EC should be possible,” he said.

At the forum organised by the Communication and Media Studies faculty of Universiti Teknologi Mara and Sinar Harian , Fuziah also rubbished the perception that youths are generally ignorant towards voting.

“The young are aware of the importance of voting,” she said.

EC: Automatic registration will cause financial strain

However, a representative from the EC, deputy secretary Noordin Che Ngah, said that the making voter registration automatic will cause confusion among the voters over their polling stations.

“For example, if a person who registered his MyKad at his birthplace but is working somewhere else, he would be confused during polling day on where to go,” he said.

He also said that while there are already laws in place to make it mandatory for a person to change the address on their MyKad every time they move residences, he acknowledged that it is not enforced.

“You have to face reality that there are so many people, myself included, who just don’t change their MyKad when they find jobs in other cities,” he said.

NONE He also said that the EC can only do so much based on the current legal provisions.

“To make voter registration automatic, you’d need a two-third majority in Parliament to amend the federal constitution, which none of the parties have,” he said to both Saifuddin and Fuziah.

However, Fuziah ( right ) chipped in and said that Pakatan is prepared to support BN in any legal amendment that ‘makes sense’.

Saifuddin estimates that automatic voter registration will boost the 21-35 age group of voters from the current 40 percent out of 11.5 million people to 49.7 percent.

‘Phantom voters still a problem’

In the meantime, Fuziah and Noordin traded barbs over the issue of phantom voters, when the former insisted that there were still such cases.

During a question-and-answer session, a member of the audience had asked why the EC was still mired in the stigma of phantom voters, which prompted vehement denials from Noordin.

“People can claim that there are phantom voters all they want but they may mistakenly call an outstation voter, whom they don’t really know, as a phantom voter,” he said.

However, Fuziah jumped on the topic, saying that she personally had experiences with phantom voters as recently as the 2008 general election.

“The EC had cleaned up the electoral rolls in 2006 but in 2008, I found that there was a name that reappeared although the person has already died.

“And during the polling day, this person actually came and voted. I lodged a police report about this and I have evidence,” she exclaimed.