The electoral watchdog was responding to the EC’s new campaign with AirAsia X Berhad and Sinar Harian, which offered newly registered voters the chance to win free flights to several destinations abroad.
AirAsia X put up 1,100 free flight tickets at the EC’s voter registration campaign held at the Kompleks Media Kumpulan Karangkraf on March 3.
In a statement today, Bersih applauded the EC’s efforts to register voters but questioned the need to offer gifts for people to exercise their basic democratic rights.
It said the commission should focus on implementing automatic voter registration, which would eradicate the need for voter registration drives to begin with.
Such a system would be linked with the National Registration Department and would eliminate the lack of addresses, duplicate entries, the appearance of deceased persons as well as other dubious entries from the electoral roll, it said.
The electoral watchdog added that it had been pushing for automatic registration of voters since the coalition’s formation but had yet to receive a reply from the EC on the matter.
Bersih also accused the EC of placing obstacles and restrictions in the way of people wanting to register as voters by allowing “baseless objections” against new voters.
The EC also revoked political parties’ assistant registrar officers (ARO) after the 13th general election and complicated the process of acquiring ARO status, Bersih said.
“The EC is playing Jekyll and Hyde in their actions,” it said.
“If the EC stays consistent in their goals, they should be supporting voter registration campaigns regardless of name or brand.”