Andrew Khoo, who co-chairs the Malaysian Bar’s constitutional committee, told FMT the emergency made it easy to amend laws.
He said the Yang di-Pertuan Agong could immediately make changes to any law needed to allow those aged 18 and above to be voters.
Rais recently said the Undi18 initiative was futile because election laws had yet to be amended to allow 18-year-olds to vote.
Khoo said laws such as the Elections (Registration of Electors) Regulations 2002 should have been amended after the Federal Constitution was amended in 2019 to allow Undi18 and automatic registration of voters.
“But since we are now under the Proclamation of Emergency, necessary amendments can be immediately promulgated by the authority of the King. So, there is no need to keep making excuses for any delay. Instead, we should be focusing on getting the job done as soon as possible.”
Lawyer Lim Wei Jiet said Rais’ claim had no basis in law as there was no legal requirement for a constitutional amendment to have the relevant laws amended.
“In fact, the constitutional amendment ought to have been enforced first to pave the way for amendments to statutes,” he said.
“It is very disappointing for the president of the Dewan Negara and a former legal practitioner to make statements that are devoid of legal basis. It’s only political positioning.
“If anything, this is evidence that PPBM and Perikatan Nasional are simply not genuine in implementing Undi18, and have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for excuses to justify this delay.”
Klang MP Charles Santiago attributed the goverment’s reluctance to allow 18-year-olds to vote to its fear that they might vote against it in the coming polls.
He said those who jumped ship to PN had forgotten that they upheld the Undi18 initiative when they were in Pakatan Harapan.
“The backtracking on Undi18 is an affront to parliamentary democracy and further cements the notion that politicians cannot be trusted,” he said.
“The necessary amendments could have been done two years ago. Now, you see a U-turn from Umno, PPBM and PAS as they sense the young people are not receptive to them.”
On Friday, youth activists filed for a High Court review of the government’s reluctance to allow Undi18, saying it was as good as voter suppression.
In a statement announcing the deferment of Undi18 until September next year, the Election Commission said the Covid-19 pandemic was hampering preparations.
The bill was unanimously approved by Parliament in 2019.
Last year, de facto law minister Takiyuddin Hassan told Parliament that the registration of 18-year-olds as voters and automatic registration would commence in July this year.
He said the process would take two years from July 25, 2019, which was the date when the Senate approved the constitutional amendment to allow the lowering of the voting age, the age of candidacy and automatic voter registration.
The amendment enjoyed bipartisan support in both the lower and upper houses of Parliament. The government said then that it would bring 7.8 million more voters to the 15th general election in 2023, taking the total eligible to vote to 22.7 million, compared to 14.9 million in GE14.