An apparently uninhabited oil palm estate in Sungai Dulang, Perak has raised eyebrows when 22 voters had supposedly registered there.

According to Hutan Melintang assemblyperson Kesavan Subramaniam, this is among the anomalies that he had found in the draft supplementary electoral roll for the first quarter of 2017.

“There were no houses, only oil palm trees, but there were 22 new registrations.

“Are you going to gazette this? Legitimise this? Can we accept it if this is gazetted? Do the oil palm trees want to vote?” he said at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.

He said that up to the final quarter of last year, Hutan Melintang normally sees between 150 and 200 new registrations and between 10 and 20 address changes per quarter.

For the first quarter of 2017 however, he said the draft supplementary electoral roll showed about 1,400 new registrations and about 1,500 changes of address.

He claimed that his checks had found about three-quarters of these changes were fraudulent.

Objections had been filed against 336 of these allegedly fraudulent voters by the deadline of the objection period on May 22.

When he attempted to submit objections against an additional 200 voters however, including the 22 who supposedly stayed at the oil palm plantation, the Election Commission (EC) rejected it saying that the objection period had already closed.

He said a total of about 30 police reports had been lodged over the matter alleging a crime under Sections 418 and 419 of the Penal Code but claimed the police said the matter was beyond their jurisdiction and took no further action.

Section 418 deals with cheating while knowing that it would cause a wrongful loss. Section 419 deals with cheating by personation. Both are punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment, a fine, or both.

With no action forthcoming from either the Perak EC nor the police, Kesavan said he had gone to the EC’s headquarters in Putrajaya on June 2 to see EC chairperson ‎Mohd Hashim Abdullah but was told that he was not in his office.

As such, he said he handed a letter to Hashim to his representative detailing his allegations and asked for an appointment so that he can describe the alleged fraud in more detail and bring proof.

He said he has yet to receive any response to date, which is why he would be mounting on a hunger strike outside the EC’s headquarters for 48 hours, or until Hashim agrees to meet him.

The hunger strike will start at 11am on June 22 until 11am on June 24, he said.

This would be his second bid at a hunger strike on the same issue, with the previous one taking place from 8am until 5pm outside the Perak EC office.