SINGAPORE - Singaporeans who have been struck off the voter rolls will be individually informed both by mail and the Singpass app to verify their status and restore their names to the Registers of Electors.

Education Minister and Minister-in-charge of the Public Service Chan Chun Sing told Parliament on Tuesday that the Elections Department (ELD) would institutionalise this going forward, in addition to the current practice of putting out statements urging voters to check their status when the non-voter list is published.

In the 2020 General Election, ELD recorded about 111,000 non-voters, while in GE2015 and GE2011 about 155,000 and 147,000 people respectively failed to cast their votes, said Mr Chan.

Mr Chan was replying to questions from Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh (Aljunied GRC), Dr Tan Wu Meng (Jurong GRC), Mr Liang Eng Hwa (Bukit Panjang) and Ms He Ting Ru (Sengkang GRC) who had filed parliamentary questions about recent election-related system issues.

Sept 1, which was Polling Day for the recent presidential election (PE2023), saw long queues form at several polling stations from 8am due to technical issues with the voter electronic registration system.

Addressing a question on this by Dr Tan, Mr Chan said there was no evidence that the technical problems were caused by cyber-attacks.

Instead, it was due to the central server not being able to handle the “inordinate amount of surge” by registration devices at the polling stations trying to send back data. As their messages did not go through, the devices kept trying to contact the server, which caused a cascade effect, said Mr Chan.

This could have been partly contributed by the morning peak: ...