Electoral reform movement Bersih has slammed the Election Commission (EC) for its voter registration campaign that involves a raffle for free flight tickets.

In a statement today, Bersih questioned the need to entice people to sign up as voters instead of implementing the automatic registration of voters.

The group said this could be done by adopting the National Registration Department (NRD) record, which eliminates perennial issues such as incomplete voter addresses, duplicate entries and non-removal of deceased persons from the voter registry, among others.

"The EC has yet to engage with Bersih on this issue, which we have been pushing for since our inception," the reform movement said.

According to EC chairperson Mohd Hashim Abdullah, there are 4.1 million people, mostly youths, who are eligible to vote but have yet to register themselves as voters.

In view of this, the EC has engaged with the private sector to sponsor incentives. One such partner is AirAsia X, which is offering 1,100 flight tickets to new voters.

This campaign will last three months.

Meanwhile, Bersih also accused EC of playing "Jekyll and Hyde" by trying to disqualify some voters and preventing political parties from registering new voters since the last general election.

"They have placed obstacles and restrictions in the way of registering new voters, yet now they are giving rewards to coax more people to register to vote," said Bersih.

The group said the EC should be supporting all voter registration campaigns, regardless of who was conducting it, including Bersih's "U Campaign", if they were truly sincere.

"In fact, Bersih wrote to the EC just last week asking for support and resources for our campaign, including requesting for approval of at least 20 AROs from Bersih to speed up voter registration.

"We have yet to hear from them," the group added.