‘Over 60,000 dubious voters in Sabah’
DAP also finds 29 instances of old IC duplications in the electoral roll.
Anisah Shukry, FMT
The Sabah electoral roll has 60,673 or 6.3% potentially dubious voters, the DAP said today.
Ong Kian Ming, director of the party’s Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap), said they arrived at this figure from the proceedings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) probing the issuance of identity cards (IC) to illegal immigrants in Sabah.
“Ruslan Alias, an assistant head in the IC division of Sabah/Sarawak in the National Registration Department [NRD], revealed a list containing 130,459 ‘problematic’ old IC numbers where their records with the NRD were either incomplete or where these cards had been cancelled,” Ong told a press conference at the party’s headquarters here.
He said Merap did a search of the old IC numbers using the first quarter of the 2012 electoral roll and found that 60,673 of those problematic ICs were on the roll.
“These voters are not evenly distributed across the state. Eight out of the top 10 parliamentary constituencies featuring these voters can be found on the east coast of Sabah. Some 66% or 39,750 voters out of the 60,673 problematic ICs can be found in these eight parliamentary seats,” said Ong.
The top eight seats are Silam (7,934 dubious voters), Kalabakan (7,536), Semporna (4,742), Libaran (3,949), Batu Sapi (3,442), Sandakan (2,603), and Kinabatangan (2,068), according to Merap.
Ong conceded that the current electoral roll may not reflect similar figures, but he said it was unlikely the Election Commission (EC) would be able to remove over 60,000 voters from the roll within a span of four months.
“Far from seeing a decrease in voters in Sabah’s electoral roll in the past few months, we have actually seen a surge of voters,” he said.
He also said Merap found 29 instances of old IC duplications from the list of problematic ICs.
“These voters are still on the electoral roll at the time of writing,” said Ong.
Serious issue
Meanwhile, Ong questioned why 20 IC numbers listed as having been cancelled in 1996 were only removed from the electoral roll in the fourth quarter of 2012.
“How did these voters manage to stay on the electoral roll up until the fourth quarter of 2012?
“Who was responsible for registering these voters with cancelled ICs? According to the data collected previously by Merap, all these voters were registered after 1996, when these ICs were supposed to be cancelled,” he added.
