KUALA LUMPUR: When Election Commission chairman Datuk Omar Mohamed Hashim retires tomorrow, he will leave with a light heart.

His sense of achievement would be in having carried out a massive cleansing of the electoral roll and having amendments made or proposed to nine Acts pertaining to the conduct of elections.

"We had an electoral roll that dated back to 43 years ago and had been snowballing with names of voters. We had to undertake a very much needed spring-cleaning," he said in an interview.

The clean up was made possible by using the huge database of the National Registration Department, he said.

Through the exercise, the commission was able to strike off almost 570,000 names from the list, but 140.000 were restored to the roll when it was found that they had not changed their old identity cards for the new ones.

Of the nine Acts pertainimg to the elections, Omar said, three major ones - Elections Act 1958, Regulations Governing Conduct of Elections and Regulations of Elections Offences - have been submitted to the Attorney-General's Chambers with the proposed amendments.

"These Acts and regulations have become archaic and we need to make sure the laws will work in accordance with the current technological and administrative changes in the new millennium," he said.

Omar said he will still be contributing to society in his capacity as chairman of the Malaysian Historical Society of which he has been a member for 35 years.

"I will be overseeing some projects that are meant to rejuvenate Malaysians of their sense of belonging to the country and their patriotism," he said.

Omar, who was in government service for 40 years, was with the Education Ministry from which he retired as deputy director-general, after which he served for almost two years as a member of the Public Services Commission and almost nine years with the Election Commission where he was deputy chairman and then chairman.