The Election Commission (EC) removed 120,000 voters from the electoral roll and added 6,705 names to it without going through the required procedures of public display and gazetting, the PKR claims.

The EC removed the names from the latest electoral roll published in September last year, Kuantan MP Fuziah Salleh told a press conference in the Parliament lobby today.

NONE "It claimed the names to be that of voters who have died, but it never displayed these names in the quarterly update. How do we know they are really dead?" Fuziah asked.

She said the discrepancies were found when PKR compared the electoral roll released in December 2010 with that issued in September 2011.

Of the 120,000 names removed, she said, 106,000 were that of ordinary voters while the other 15,122 were postal voters.

"When we asked (EC) to remove 10,000 ineligible voters in Sabah from the roll, it refused. But now it is removing names in other places.

"This is a clear attempt to manipulate the electoral roll," Fuziah said, referring to the ineligible voters issue raised by PKR last year.

The country's election law requires the EC to update the electoral roll every three months and to display a quarterly draft supplementary electoral roll.

Skipping procedures is highly unacceptable

The draft contains the update on the newly-registered voters, voters who have changed their residing addresses and voters who have deceased and is put on one-week public display at the end of each quarter.

Members of the public can raise their objections to the names during the display period, before the draft is gazetted and used in the next general election.

Fuziah said any attempt to skip the rightful procedure to amend the electorate roll would be highly unacceptable.

She expressed fears that the election results of certain opposition-held constituencies would affected if this trend continued.

“Some of our seats were won on a majority of only 1,000 votes. If they suddenly remove 600 voters, what will happen to the result?” she asked.

The PKR vice-president, also called on the government to engage an independent body to inspect the EC’s operations.

“I afraid there is a ‘System B’ in the EC to add and remove names without following the established procedures,” Fuziah added.