The Election Commission (EC) intends to have a fresh electoral roll, which involves the re-registration of all eligible voters in the country. However, such a move will be held if and only if the government accepts the proposal where a Parliament bill needs to be tabled and passed.

Pros

The much alleged tainted electoral roll which many claims contain phantom voters will be abandoned in place of a fresh voter list. This will solve the problem of phantom voters, and many other problems with the existing roll.

Cons

Now, here, this is about the logistics. We are talking about the re-registration of about 11 million voters, and about 5 million citizens of qualified age who we have tried hard to persuade them to register themselves but did not do so.

So we need to encourage everyone to re-register. And you will have this problem - last minute registration! Just like how most Malaysians change their ICs to MyKad at the last minute in 2006 before the free MyKad promotion ended!

And if a huge number of eligible voters do not re-register, we will have a problem of many eligible voters not able to vote in the next general elections!

Clearly, the EC needs to also plan ahead on the logistics of re-registration.