Responding to DAP’s suspicions over the sudden spike in the number of new voters in Selangor, the Election Commission (EC) claimed that it was a normal trend because Malaysians tend to register as voters at the eleventh hour.

NONE EC deputy chairperson Wan Ahmad Wan Omar ( left ) told Sinar Harian that there were some 720,000 unregistered voters in Selangor, and they only started to register themselves since the third and fourth quarter of 2011.

“Most of the eligible voters who had not registered chose to do so at the last minute, causing a spike of new voters in some areas but it is normal,” he was quoted as saying by the Malay daily.

The same phenomenon was seen before before the 2004 and 2008 general election, hence there is no need to be surprised or worried, Wan Ahmad said.

NONE He was responding to Pandamaran assemblyperson Ronnie Liu’s allegation that close to half of the 5,000 new voters in his constituency were registered by unknown individuals.

This sudden jump in voter numbers was also seen in other constituencies held by the opposition such as Hulu Selangor and Kapar where some 19,000 and 18,000 new voters, respectively, were registered since the last general polls.

In view of this, Liu, who is also the state DAP exco member, said his service centre will recruit 1,000 volunteers to bust ‘phantom voters’.

Incomplete addresses

Earlier on, Serdang MP Teo Nie Ching also revealed that the opposition constituencies - Hulu Selangor, Hulu Langat, Selayang, and her constituency Serdang - saw a sharp increase in voter numbers, from 21.2 percent to 23.2 percent, compared with the state-wide average increase of 17.5 percent.

She claimed that the latest release of new voters list showed many had incomplete addresses.

“This makes it difficult for us to check whether the person in the list is a valid voter or not,” she said.

However, Wan Ahmad dismissed the allegation of ‘phantom voters’ in the electoral roll as every registration of a new voter is cross-checked with the database of the National Registration Department (NRD).

“The issue of phantom voters does not exist because the EC will check the address of the applicant whether it is the same as the address registered with NRD or not, and we will only process the application if both addresses are the same,” he explained.