87. 78,340 names removed from Sabah voter roll – EC

http://www.theborneopost.com/2013/02/24/78340-names-removed-from-sabah-voter-roll-ec/

78,340 names removed from Sabah voter roll – EC

by Murib Morpi. Posted on February 24, 2013, Sunday

KOTA KINABALU: The Election Commission (EC) has removed a total of 78,340 names from the Sabah electoral roll as of the third quarter of last year.
They were part of the 1,133,279 names deleted nationwide in a continuous effort to clean up the country’s electoral roll, according to Election Commission Information Technology Division’s chief assistant secretary, Shafee Sajat, yesterday.
The 58th witness in the hearing by Royal Commission of Inquiry on illegal immigrants (RCI) in Sabah testified that 979,943 of the names were deleted after the National Registration Department (NRD) confirmed the voters had died.
He said the rest, 20,000 including 2,810 in Sabah, were those whose citizenship had been revoked and 7,286 individuals with no record in the NRD, including three in Sabah.
Elaborating on electorate whose record could not be found in the NRD database, he said the names were detected after the EC had conducted a cross-check of their identification card numbers with the NRD.
RCI proceedings observer, Datuk Chau Chin Tang, questioned the significant increase in the number of registered voters in Sabah, from 807,862 in 2008 to 959,669 in the second half of last year.
Shafee responded that a decrease or increase in the number of electorate from one year to another was normal which was caused by registration of new voters or removal of existing names due to death or change of voting address to outside of Sabah.
He also told the inquiry that there were 40,955 non-Sabahans who were registered as voters in the State while 30,586 were Sabahans born in other states, with 8,656 of them born in Sarawak.
On voters who were born overseas, he said there were over 8,000 of them in the electoral roll.