KOTA KINABALU: The call for a thorough investigation into the unusual spike in the latest Sabah electoral roll has intensified, with Datuk Seri Dr Jeffrey Kitingan (pic) the latest demanding the authorities to probe the matter immediately.
The Sabah Deputy Chief Minister and Sabah STAR president said he shared fellow Gabungan Rakyat Sabah’s (GRS) party Sabah Progressive Party’s (SAPP) concerns over the matter.
“Sabahan voters are equally shocked by this revelation. They demand answers from the authorities and their immediate action,” he said, in a statement here on Wednesday (Oct 19).
SAPP president Datuk Yong Teck Lee had on Monday (Oct 17) called on the Election Commission for a forensic audit to be conducted on the sharp increase in the number of voters in the latest Sabah electoral roll.
Yong said the latest figure of 574,120 new voters in Sabah from 1.06 million voters in 2008 to more than 1.6 million voters in 2022 was worrying as it could include dubious MyKad holders.
Following Yong’s revelation, Kitingan said he was equally shocked to learn that there was “a very unusual spike” in the number of voters in the Keningau parliamentary constituency which he won in the 2018 general election.
He said that he came to learn that there was more than a 70% increase in the number of voters in the Keningau seat.
“This is very unusual and suspicious,” he said, disclosing that the number of voters in Keningau was 51,777 in 2018 but jumped to 87,371 in 2022, making it a 70.7% increase.
He said that he was also informed that the number of Undi18 in the constituency was less than 8,000.
“There’s no way we can have an increase of over 30,000 voters in just less than five years. Something is wrong,” Kitingan said.
Yong, a former chief minister, had earlier said the latest figure (of 1.6 million voters in Sabah in 2022) came following the automatic registration of voters above the age of 18.
He claimed that in the past, many dubious citizenship holders were not registered as voters as they feared detection by authorities if they did so.
However, he said once automatic voter registration was introduced in 2019, all eligible MyKad and IC holders in the National Registration Department (NRD) database were automatically registered.
Thus, he said, a forensic audit and investigation of the electoral roll must be done.
