At the end of October last year, the EC had issued a list of 42,051 voters it deemed to be dubious and would be removed if not verified within a two-month period. It later extended the verification window till the end of January.
“We provided a long period, of two months, at the request of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Electoral Reform although the display is usually for a month and should have ended on December 31,” EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof was quoted in the report.
In December, the police also began linking death records to the National Registration Department and the EC as part of the effort to clean up the electoral roll.
Aziz added later that there were 12,400,437 registered voters as at September 2011, while the number of unregistered voters stood at 3,731,134.
The cleaning up of the voter list is one of eight demands made by electoral reforms movement Bersih 2.0, the organisers of the July 9, 2011 rally calling for free and fair elections.
The Najib administration threw a security cordon around the capital city in response to the rally and arrested nearly 1,700 people during the gathering.
Since then, the government has set up an all-party parliamentary select committee to go through proposed electoral reforms.
