THE mother of a man with Down Syndrome is furious her 24-year-old son has been illegally registered as a voter, adding to concerns of voter fraud among electoral watchdog groups.

Valerie Sandra Sethupathy lodged a police report at the Seremban police station yesterday urging an investigation into the matter involving her son, Matthew Gideon Kanagaratnam, who is now a voter in the Seremban parliamentary seat and Ampangan state seat.

In her police report, sighted by Malaysia Decides, the 58-year-old lawyer said she had been working in her office in Seremban when she decided to check her voting status and that of her children on the Election Commission website (www.spr.gov.my).

“I found that he had been registered as a voter without the knowledge and consent of his parents, my husband and I.

“As his mother, I know that my son does not have the capacity to vote due to his disability and inability to read and write. As such, my husband and I have never registered him as a voter,” Valerie said in her police report.

She declined to be interviewed, but forwarded photos of Matthew’s MyKad and Kad OKU, the disability card issued by the Welfare Department, for verification.

A check on the EC website using Matthew’s MyKad number showed that he was registered to vote in the Seremban and Ampangan seats.

Seremban, a DAP stronghold since the 2008 election, is affected by the EC redelineation exercise. Its voter composition has changed from 44% Malay in 2013 to 49%, and 41% Chinese to 37%. The number of Indian voters decreased by one percentage point.

The report came as Bersih 2.0 and Engage released a statement today highlighting several examples of voter fraud uncovered through their analysis of the electoral roll.

Irregularities include re-registration of deceased voters as new voters; re-emergence of voters who had cast ballots in GE12 but disappeared from the roll in GE13; voters whose years of birth did not match their IC numbers; multiple voters registered at the same house address; voters without addresses; retired police officers still registered as advance voters; and different postal voters bearing the same army identification number.

Bersih and Engage said these irregularities were “nothing new” and had already been affirmed by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Electoral Reform that investigated these concerns in 2011 and made recommendations to the EC.

“We are extremely concerned that these irregularities continue to persist, given that the general election is going to be held next week,” the two groups said in their joint statement.

They said they were willing to provide lists of suspicious voters in each constituency to candidates and their polling agents to refer to on polling day and also urged all legitimate voters to cast their votes early to prevent fraud and impersonation. – May 3, 2018.