Despite numerous complaints over the electoral roll, Election Commission chief Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof declared that Malaysia has the cleanest electoral roll in the world.

In an interview with Sin Chew Daily published yesterday, Abdul Aziz repeatedly stressed that the existing electoral roll is clean and no country in the world has a cleaner one than ours.

NONE As such, he argued that it is not necessary for the EC to revamp the current electoral roll.

Abdul Aziz was responding to Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim's suggestion on Wednesday that Selangor should not hold its state election concurrently with the general election before the electoral roll is cleaned up.

Regardless of whether Selangor will dissolve its state assembly when nationwide elections are called, Abdul Aziz insisted that the state election, even if held later, will use the same electoral roll as the one in the general election.

According to Abdul Aziz, having a separate state-level election in Selangor will only waste more time and money.

The EC chief has also cleared the disputed 42,000 dubious names on the electoral roll which were earlier said to be unverifiable .

EC adamant, no changes to be made

According to him, the National Registration Department had just responded to the EC, explaining that 22,000 of these voters did not change their identity number to the new 12-digit number, and another 18,000 voters did not update their old identity cards to MyKad.

The opposition parties had urged the EC to remove the names from the electoral roll after they were put on public display for two months with no one coming forward to verify their identities.

EC however refused to do so, claiming that it has no legal power to remove the names.

Abdul Aziz also told the Chinese daily that out of the 1,906,008 voters in Selangor, only some 3,000, or 0.16 percent, voters whose identities are doubtful.

"Do you say the whole cloth is dirty just because there is a little stain on it? This is just very little. Therefore, we will not revamp the electoral roll despite Pakatan's views," he was quoted as saying.