Election Commission (EC) chairperson Azhar Azizan Harun says the organisation will release unverified election result data as soon as they are received so that the EC can be as fast as Malaysiakini.

"Among the initiatives we were thinking of is to release the data from unverified Form 14 (as soon as we receive it from WhatsApp).

"This is not the results, this is just unverified data from Form 14.

"Malaysiakini gets their data from the same agents as well, so why can't we do the same?" he said to reporters after wrapping up the roundtable discussion on electoral reforms in Parliament today.

Form 14 is also known as the post-tallying statement form (Borang Penyata Pengundian Selepas Pengiraan Undi), which contains the names of all the relevant candidates, political parties as well as the total votes for a polling station. 

Azhar said the current practice is that the EC will only announce the official results after they receive the hard copies of Form 14 at the tallying centre, though they would have received pictures of it through WhatsApp much earlier.

However, he shied away from calling the Form 14 data "unofficial results". 

"(It is) not unofficial results. I do not like calling it unofficial results because people will ask why is there an 'unofficial' and 'official' result.

"The data from Form 14 is that which is yet to be verified," he explained.