KUALA LUMPUR, July 23 — The problem of suspect identity cards in Sabah exposed in the royal inquiry on the state’s illegal immigrants problem could “spill over” to the rest of Malaysia if left unaddressed, DAP MP Ong Kian Ming said today.

The lawmaker claimed that the findings of the ongoing royal commission of inquiry (RCI) in Sabah amounted to conclusive proof that the electoral roll is riddled with irregularities.

“I strongly urge the Barisan Nasional government take seriously the accumulated findings of the Sabah RCI which point conclusively to the fact that the current electoral roll is filled with many voters with ‘problematic’ ICs.

“I further urge the BN government to clean up the electoral roll by conducting a thorough investigation into the authenticity of these above mentioned ICs,” the Serdang MP said in a statement.

Ong said that failure to take concrete action at the end of the Sabah RCI would render it a “meaningless exercise”, adding that the genuine Sabahan voters and residents would continue to be marginalised.

In the same statement, Ong had referred to senior National Registration Department (NRD) officer Ruslan Alias’s testimony before the Sabah RCI panel on January 16 this year.

According to Ong, the assistant head of the department’s IC division for Sabah and Sarawak had disclosed a list of 130,549 flawed old ICs – with the bulk of it having incomplete information, while the rest were cancelled in 1996.

“These old IC numbers were divided into lists of P1 (51,300 old IC numbers), P2 (62,550 old IC numbers) and P3 (16,699 old IC numbers),” Ong said, with P1 and P2 being the category for old IC with incomplete records, while the latter are for those that have been struck off the national registry.

Ong said that he found 49,159 voters had used these flawed ICs when registering for the electoral roll, which numbered around 13.3 million in the 13th general elections. He said that these figures are made up of 23,179 and 25,980 old ICs from the P1 and P2 list respectively.

The academic went on to say that close to 5 per cent of Sabah’s voters own old IC numbers under P1 and P2, with 8 out of 10 of the parliamentary areas on Sabah’s east coast having the highest number of such flawed ICs.

He appeared to take aim at the so-called “Project IC”, saying that a whopping 53.9 per cent of voters had registered to vote between 1990 and 2000, noting that it was at the peak of the project where illegal immigrants were allegedly given citizenships in exchange for their votes.

But Ong noted that the registration of voters using P1 and P2 ICs had not ended, with 25.7 per cent of them going on the electoral roll in the years after 2000.

“This means that the registering of voters with ‘problematic’ old ICs is still continuing,” he said.

“Finally, this problem threatens to ‘spill-over’ to other states in Malaysia,” Ong said, saying his checks had found 6,030 voters with the problematic IC numbers in other parts of the country.