The Star: March 4, 2008By ROYCE CHEAH
KOTA BARU: Kelantan Barisan Nasional is now complaining about phantom or cloned voters and has accused PAS of being guilty of it.
State Barisan Nasional chairman Datuk Annuar Musa said the Barisan machinery was having difficulty in identifying more than 118,000, or 15%, of the 751,000 registered voters in the state.
On Sunday, PAS vice-president Datuk Husam Musa had alleged that there were “cloned” voters as PAS had identified a few postal voters who were simultaneously registered as normal voters.
To this, Annuar retorted: “Our suspicion is that this issue was raised to protect themselves. We have no knowledge about these cloned voters.
“It is either them or us. Somebody must be doing it. Maybe those who are talking about it are doing it themselves,” Annuar said after chairing a strategic meeting with Barisan candidates yesterday.
“Either these voters do not exist in their kampung or nobody within our machinery could recognise who they are and where they are from.”
He said voters who could not be identified were present in every state seat and that Barisan’s machinery was careless for not voicing objections when the electoral roll was put on display.
“For this election, we will monitor these voters. We will find out the names of those we don’t know and we will wait for them to turn up.”
“But from a legal point of view, there is nothing we can do to object against this.”
He added that an additional worry for Barisan was the fact PAS registered 26,304 voters in 2006 while Barisan only managed 9,358 voters.
“If PAS can register that much, it is not normal – this then contributes to the 118,000 people we cannot identify,” said Annuar.