A supreme council member of the party, Dr Chong Eng Leong (pictured) claimed that it was a relevant step in order to “clean up” the Sabah Electoral Roll of voters believed to be in possession of dubious identity cards.

He urged the EC to scrutinise the original identity card application forms of the new voters to determine whether the statutory declarations or birth certificates had been falsified.

“We have reasons to believe that a substantial number of foreigners in Sabah are in possession of Malaysian identity cards obtained through dubious means,” he said in a statement issued here yesterday.

While commending the EC’s effort to set up registration counters on Sundays and every third Saturday of the month starting from July 15, he said it was his belief that of the 757,090 voters registered in Sabah, more than 60,000 were suspects of questionable citizenship.

Based on the assumption that some 230,000 Malaysians in Sabah had yet to register, he projected that there should therefore be a total of 987,000 eligible voters in the state.

But he deduced that it was not possible to have such an inflated figure.

To substantiate his claims, he cited the figures reflected in the 2001 National Census (See table).

He argued that if Sabah’s population increased at a rate similar to Sarawak, the actual population of Sabah in the year 2000 should have been 1,301,372 as shown at the bottom of the table.

However, he pointed out that it was not logical for a population of 1,301,372 genuine citizens to have 987,000 eligible voters above 21 years old.

Therefore, 1,148,017 or 47 per cent of the 2,449,389 population in 2000 could be “dubious citizens” or foreigners, he said.

“We therefore appeal to EC to please scrutinise the background of future voters, as it will be a laborious and arduous task for the EC to expunge them once the Electoral Roll is certified,” he stressed.