DAP Kinta Valley in Perak is questioning whether electoral system is being manipulated due to a recent surge of postal voters in the Ipoh Timor parliamentary seat, and in particular its Canning state seat.

Wong Kah Woh, DAP Canning state representative, noted the increase in postal voters over a three-month period as reported in the draft second quarter electoral roll 2011, at 971 for Ipoh Timor and 905 for Canning respectively.

Yellow Saturday Programme by Kinta Valley DAP in Pasir Puteh Market Canning is one of the three state seats under the parliamentary seat of Ipoh Timor, which is held by DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang.

Wong said the increase for Canning in such a short period had exceeded even that of new ordinary voters (434 voters).

“This has recalled our memory of how postal voters were being manipulated in the same constituencies in 2007, a year before the 2008 election,” said Wong in a statement today.

"In a reply to the questions raised by the DAP reps in the Parliament, the government has revealed that the postal voters in Ipoh Timor has increased from 1,800 in the year of 2004 to 4,000 in the year of 2007.

"The figure were reduced to approximately 2,500 votes only after the objections raised by DAP."

Questions for EC

Given this, Wong said the sudden increase of the postal voters again in Ipoh Timor and Canning just before the 13th general election "is clearly not a coincidence".

He pointed out that his state constituency has contributed most of the new postal voters to Ipoh Timor, comprising 148 newly registered and 757 transferred voters.

Among the questions that Wong demanded the Election Commission to answer are:

  • Why was there such a drastic increase in the postal voters in the two constituencies, which was even higher than the increase of the ordinary voters?
  • Where are all the postal voters being transferred from in view of most of the new postal voters are actually transferred postal voters?

Both Ipoh Timor and Canning are considered safe DAP seats - in 2008 general election, Lim and Wong won with a 21,942-vote and 5,666-vote majorities in their respective constitutencies.

As part of its 'Yellow Saturday' programme today, DAP Kinta Valley distributed 100 'Clean and Fair Elections' yellow balloons and hundreds of flyers on Bersih 2.0's eight demands for a clean election.