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Rafizi offers to come up with online voter registration system for EC

PKR's Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli said he would work with his volunteers from IT backgrounds to come up with a way to implement an online voter registration system, to recommend to the Election Commission (EC).

"(It will be) a system that is easy, cheap, safe and can be implemented as soon as possible, so that they (the EC) cannot give excuses that they do not have budget, allocation and so on," he told a a press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.

Rafizi said his NGO Invoke will also launch a portal next week where the public can log issues that they faced while trying to register as a voter.

After about two weeks, he said, they will visit the EC office to hand over a catalogue of the complaints as well as their proposal for an online registration system.

The PKR secretary-general said they had received many complaints about difficulties in registering, a week after launching their #UntungDaftar program, which offers cash prizes for youth to register as voters.

People had told them that the office had run out of forms, or that the EC system was offline, among others, he said.

"It's time to face one of the root causes, that is that the process of method by the EC is not efficient (in registering voters)," he said.

He asked why the system is still manual, pointing out that this makes it difficult for those living in rural areas to register as they have to travel to the nearest post office or EC office to do so.

The EC also takes three months and more to confirm a registration, he said.

"We live in the age of Facebook and Internet. People just log in and submit something and you can probably get immediate confirmation.

"Even PKR operates an online registration system. Why is it that the EC, for voter registration purposes, still uses a manual system that takes three months?" he asked.

He also suggested that the EC link up to the National Registration Department (NRD) database, where all the information on qualified voters would be easily accessible.

"If that can be done, I'm confident we can register over four million youth voters," he said.

During the press conference, he also announced the cash prize winners of the first week of their #UntungDaftar program.

There was one first prize winner of RM1,000, two second-prize winners of RM500 each and three third-prize winners of RM200 each.

Invoke received 1,031 contest submissions from newly registered voters in this first week, he said, and they will continue promoting this program more aggressively.

He expressed confidence that they could get up to 10,000 to register as voters through this program alone.

Next week's winners will be announced at the same time next Tuesday, he added.

He said he hoped to continue this program for as long as possible, though he said the form of the prizes might change in the future.

"So if you want to win money, you'd better register now, before I run out of money," he joked.

This program had received criticism from electoral watchdog Bersih and anti-graft group Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) though political analysts welcomed the effort.

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