KOTA KINABALU, Oct 19 — Three state parties have called for a thorough vetting of the electoral roll in Sabah due to the extraordinary spike of half a million registered voters since 2018.

Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) information chief Joniston Bangkuai said that the unusual increase was suspect and all divisions should take it upon themselves to scrutinise the rolls and identify possible illegitimate new voters.

"The party’s divisions need to go above and beyond to proactively scrutinise the electoral rolls for names that could be alien to them,” the Kiulu assemblyman said.

"Compile and report these findings to the party headquarters so we have a basis to pursue the next course of action.”

Bangkuai said PBS would be exploring legal avenues to obtain the relevant data to scrutinise the state’s significant growth in registered voters.

He also revealed that the increase was not due to Undi18 but happened between 2018 and 2020.

PBS had said previously that Undi18 should be put off in Sabah until after the existing voter list is vetted and verified as free of suspicious voters.

Bangkuai said PBS had also made repeated requests for appointments with the Election Commission (EC) to obtain assurances that the Sabah electoral roll was clean and devoid of questionable voters if it persisted in continuing with the automatic registration of Undi18 voters in the state.

The requests, however, have yet to be entertained to date.

On Monday, Sabah Progressive Party president Datuk Yong Teck Lee called on the EC to conduct a forensic audit on the sharp increase in voters in the latest Sabah electoral roll.

Yong said the latest figure of 574,120 new voters in Sabah is a 53.9 per cent increase from the 1,064,686 in 2008 to 1,638,806 this year, leading to suspicions that the surge could be due to a high number of dubious voters.

Yong claimed that based on a preliminary review of the 2022 election roll, many of the new voters were aged above 30 years old while some were in their 60s.

He also found it suspicious to see so many middle-aged people as newly registered voters.

Earlier, deputy chief minister and Parti Solidariti Tanah Airku president Datuk Seri Jeffrey Kitingan also called for a probe, pointing out that his Keningau parliamentary constituents had increased by over 70 per cent from 51,777 in 2018 to 87,371 in 2022.

"This is very unusual and suspicious,” he said.

He also said that he was informed the number of Undi18 voters in the Keningau parliamentary constituency was less than 8,000.

"There’s no way we can have an increase of over 30,000 in just under five years.

"Something is wrong,” he said.