Re-enter Dropped Names- PBS To EC
Wednesday, 14 April 2004 (source: Bernama)

KOTA KINABALU: The Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) today urged the Election Commission (EC) to re-enter names of bona fide voters which had been inadvertently dropped from the electoral roll.

PBS Secretary-General Datuk Radin Malleh said the EC could use the 2001 electoral roll as a guide for comparison to detect such dropped names.

By way of example, Radin said a random check by his party early this year showed several names known to it had been dropped from the voter list.

Radin said his wife's name which was included in the 2001 electoral roll was not in the roll used for the 11th General Election conducted last month.

"Because of this, my wife was not able to vote in the election," he told Bernama here.

Radin Malleh, who is the Assemblyman for Melalap, said soon after realising that her name was not in the list, his wife wrote to the EC and asked for her name to be included but her appeal went unheeded.

He said the EC itself should rectify the problem as the mistake could be traced to the commission itself.

He believed that many others would also have faced similar problems.

"It is not appropriate to ask the voters whose names had been dropped to register once more... it is not their mistake but that of the EC," Radin said.

He said the names could have been dropped perhaps due to the system of year-round registration implemented in 2002.

The new system and gazetting the names of voters every three months caused frequent "disruption" to the voter list, he said.

"The roll is disrupted several times and in the process some names could have been dropped," he said.

Radin hoped the EC would overcome this problem when it was still in the initial stage so that no confusion would arise when voters found the names missing in the list when the next election was around.