If it was not for the Star in revealing the issue of a few weird voters’ name in the list of registered voters, the opposition and BERSIH might have gone berserk for not believing that those are real legitimate voters.
At a glance, those weird names do look like false voters. Few of them include ‘S’, ‘Atas Jalan’ (On the Road), ‘Tepi Jalan’(By the Road), ‘Machine Gun’, ‘Boeing’, ‘Elvis Presley’ and others. But according to the Election Commission (EC), those names are legitimate names because they are enlisted in the record of identity cards that is legitimate. Besides that, EC also confirmed the fact that there are about 15,000 names in the voters’ registration records are not as same as their identity cards. In this case, EC has no rights to delete them from the registered voters’ list because they are registered as legitimate citizens of Malaysia.
The same problem goes where there are about 1,000 voters who are at the age of more than 100 years old which had raised doubts. However, the EC has no rights to delete their names from the voters’ list as long as there are no death records updated by their family members.
EC also said that now there are about 3.7 million people who can vote but they are still yet to register themselves.
What is certain is that the EC had done everything they can to ensure that the voters’ list is clean even though matters as these is making things a lot harder.
Whatever it is, the number of registered voters for now is 12.5 million, while the number of voters in doubt are about 15,000 to 16,000, a very small number. Moreover, not all of those voters are in the same district. Besides, by labelling them in the ‘doubtful list’ does not mean that they are not legitimate.
That is why we are saying that the actions of BERSIH fighting in streets are just illogical and over dramatic. Things went even more bogus when they chanted that they want to bring down the government during BERSIH 3.0. What is the logic in bringing down the government when there are around 15,000 to 16,000 of weird names in the voters’ list?
Is the opposition confident that they could win if they managed to confirm that all those 16,000 people do not exist?
The fact that the opposition has to swallow is that EC had done their best and if they do lose in the upcoming election, it is because rakyat is sick of their leaders’ and BERSIH’s drama.
If the opposition really want to win the coming election, they do not need to demonstrate, or accuse the police, EC or the government with issues.
What they need to do is to show their maturity, ethical work and do as they say. Instead, the opposition’s actions against the government is only bringing rakyat away from them. Hence, even if the voters’ list is cleaned 100%, we still cannot be certain that they would win the election.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/5/21/nation/11329249&sec=nation
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