“Their non-transparent behaviour only means that they are hiding something.
“Otherwise, why all of a sudden keep away information that has been available for the past 10 years or so?
“Why have they decided to make information unavailable this year?”
Aeria was commenting on an article on Monday by reform movement Aliran on its website that the EC was making concerted efforts to stop detection of problems in the electoral roll.
Aliran said EC had refused to provide the supplementary electoral roll in database format with effect from the first quarter of 2017.
It said this had made it harder for political parties and interested individuals to detect the presence of phantom voters.
Such information in digital format allowed political parties to analyse and evaluate the additions, deletions and transfers of voters to and from their constituencies.
Without them, analysis is almost impossible, Aliran said.
Aeria said the EC has also deliberately ignored conveniences that are available to register new voters and deregister existing voters.
“The EC has a direct link with the National Registration Department (NRD), but yet they have decided to make things difficult for new voters.”
Aeria said when a person turned 21, they had to change their identification cards. The EC could automatically register them as a voter at that time, he said.
“Similarly, when a person gives up his citizenship or dies, deregistration can be done immediately. These are conveniences that the EC has chosen to ignore.
“It is the 21st century, but yet the EC is stuck in the Dark Ages,” he said.
According to Aliran’s report, the EC also allowed spurious objections to new voters added to the electoral roll.
This was most prominent in Selangor, where voters linked to Umno had regularly objected to newly-registered voters of a particular ethnicity when their names appeared in the supplementary electoral roll.
Penang Institute board member Steven Sim agreed that the EC’s actions impeded the democratic process.
He referred to a January 2017 academic report by a scholar that found that Malaysia ranked 142 out of 158 in terms of electoral integrity.
The research paper, titled “Malaysia’s Electoral Process: The Methods and Costs of Perpetuating Umno Rule”, was written by University of British Columbia assistant professor Kai Ostwald.
Malaysia is placed above Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and communist-ruled Vietnam, but far below regional neighbours such as Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The researcher found the country’s electoral process had been systematically manipulated to produce biased outcomes meant to keep the ruling party in power.
Sim said if the EC is seen as highly partial and the process filled with widespread allegations of fraud, from voters’ registration to balloting, any election outcome may not be recognised.
“The EC must not jeorpardise our democracy for the political interests of the ruling regime,” Sim said.
He said for now, the country’s electoral integrity ranks very low. Therefore, the public’s confidence of the credibility of EC is also low, Sim added.
He reminded EC commissioners and officials that they can be brought to court even after retirement if any legal cases crop up.
“EC officials who feel they were instructed to impede our democracy should keep a good record of these instructions to protect themselves in the future,” said Sim.