Why is the integrity of the electoral re-alignment process
of utmost importance and should be addressed immediately?
As seen in the recently ended GE15, the “rights” exercised
by each citizen was severely disproportionate. A little history lesson to help
understand this Orwellian equality would be useful to digest the implications of
an uneven electoral playing field faced by the Rakyat.
When Malaya gained independence, the country had 52 parliamentary
seats distributed within the 11 states. While the rural weightage was not
specified, the Reid Commission (set up by the British masters to study the electoral
system implementation in Malaya) provided that ‘the numbers of inhabitants within
each constituency should be approximately equal except that, having regard to
the greater difficulty of contacting voters in the country districts and the
other disadvantages facing rural constituencies, a measure of “weightage” for
area should be given to the rural constituencies’. At that time, a 15% additional
weightage for rural votes was considered acceptable. However, due to political
interference as a result of the growing concern that non Malays were
concentrated in large numbers in urban areas, that rural margin weightage limit
was adjusted to that ‘the Election Committee would not regard such weightage
as unreasonable if in some instances a rural constituency should contain as
little as one-half of the constituents in the more populous areas’. This
was included in the terms of reference of the Constituency Delineation Commission
(Federation of Malaya, 1954) to divide the country into 52 constituencies – the
number of elected legislative seats finally agreed to by the British and the
Alliance Party (precursor to Barisan National - BN). This skewered rural
weightage resulted in Malay dominated constituencies in all but two of the
constituencies. The Alliance Party won 51 of the 52 seats in the first federal
election in 1955.
With the
invitation of Sabah and Sarawak into Malaya to become Malaysia, the Alliance/BN
orchestrated several delineation exercises and created numerous constituencies until
it became the 222 seats today. These “electoral
exercises” (aka known as gerrymandering) were primarily done to affect Malaysian
electoral outcomes: the distribution of the total electorate among
constituencies (apportionment) and the determination of constituency boundaries
(districting) – both done for political advantage to the ruling party, the BN.
Delineating/creating constituencies with unequal number of voters (i.e.
malapportionment) favours BN sub-component parties with more supporters in the
smaller constituencies. Since the Opposition supporters were usually in urban
areas, it was expedient to lump them all in a constituency that was lost
anyway. This worked well till GE13 when the tide of the Rakyat’s dissatisfaction
with the BN was originally sparked by Hindraf and later fanned by Bersih. Some
say, without Hindraf’s brave stand against the blatant corruption and abuses by
BN, the Rakyat would not have seen the change we see now.
Statistical
overview:
Malaysian
population: 34 mil
Malaysians
registered to vote: 21 mil or about 62%
Malaysians
actually voted: 15.9 mil or about 75%
turnout
Electoral
seats overview:
We analyzed the data collated from the 222 constituencies from the EC website and will make simple some statistics from GE15 that will shock many Malaysians on the Orwellian world of Malaysian citizenry as follows.
·
Selangor with a population of 7 mil or about 22% of Malaysia, has 22
seats or less than 10% of the parliamentarians.
·
Sabah with a population of 3.4 mil or about 9% of Malaysia, has 25 seats
or about 11% of the parliamentarians.
·
Sarawak with a population of 2.5 mil or about 8% of Malaysia, has 31
seats or about 14% of the parliamentarians.
·
The largest constituency (Bangi) with almost 303,000 registered voters got
one YB whereas the smallest (Igan) with 28,000 registered voters, got their own
YB. Amazingly, a rural Malaysian has 11 times more voting power than someone in
Bangi.
·
As seen from the chart above, the top 5 urban constituencies with a registered
vote base of 1.25 mil earned 5 parliamentarians while the bottom 5 rural
constituencies with a vote base of a mere 154,000 also earned themselves 5
parliamentarians. This totally anomalous constitutional rights abrogation takes
gerrymandering to new heights.
1. 8% of Malaysians gave 73 seats to
Perikatan Nasional (PN)
The
terrible outcome of this gerrymandered electoral boundaries is that today, 8%
of the population voting for PN, gifted it 73 of the 222 law making seats. Pakatan
Harapan (PH), getting almost 28% of the votes cast, or some 4.4 million votes,
won 82 seats. If the original 15% overweight margin for rural seats had been
maintained, PH would have won at least 103 seats.
Then Dato
Seri Anwar Ibrahim (Anwar) would have had to court only 9 Yang Berhormats (YB) running
as “Bebas” to form the government: i) we would not need 2 Deputy Prime
Ministers, ii) YBs with pending criminal charges would not feature in the new
government, iii) cabinet would likely be limited to 25 ministers.
2. BN won 4% of the votes but
controls 30 seats in Parliament
This statistics
is perhaps the most vile of all in terms of its devastating effect. Can you
imagine, a mere 681,278 Malaysians voted in 30 YBs from BN into our Parliament.
These 681,278 form just 4% of the Malaysian population. The most outrageous
outcome was that the BN, through some 60 years of unfettered fiddling with the
electoral boundaries, needed an average of 22,709 voters per rural constituency,
to put its (wo)man in power. Anwar needed almost 54,000 voters per constituency
for one YB from PH.
If the
Rakyat had allowed BN to continue at this rate of electoral reengineering, by
GE 16, it would need about 8% of the total voters or about 1.3 million
Malaysians only, to take over the government for a population of some 35
million by then: All Malaysian voters are equal but some are more equal than
others?
3. PAS won 12% of the total votes and
controls 20% of the Parliamentary seats
PAS
leader Tan Sri Hadi Awang (Tok Guru) was dead wrong when he said that PN was
the winner of the election when the statistics clearly show that only 12% of the
Malaysian voters chose PAS. And these too, were mainly limited to the rural Malay
majority states of Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, Kedah and some constituents in
Pahang, Perak and Johor. The visual representation below of the voting outcome is
rather misleading.
To put
this “green wave” theory into perspective, PAS won in states (and
constituencies) that make up about 23% of the Malaysian population. There is
another analysis that says PN took about 54% of the Malay votes. How can PAS claim
to have acceptance by “most” Malaysians as the party to lead the government. About
25% of Malaysians did not vote and this was a big disservice to the voice of reason
in GE15.
Someone
please show Tok Guru our analysis as he is clearly causing a lot of confusion
among the unsuspecting Rakyat.
4. Sarawak had the best “bang for
the buck” in terms of performance in GE15
It is very
apparent that Abang Jo is the ultimate winner in this GE. He managed to garner
less than 674,000 votes but ended up with 31 seats in Parliament. GPS needed
less than 20,000 voters per constituency to become the 4th largest bloc
in Parliament.
Because
of this powerful voting leverage, we are betting that a Deputy PM post will be
offered to Sarawak. We could also see at least 2 Sarawakians or more, as
ministers in Anwar’s cabinet.
5. DAP was the most successful party
in GE15 but its appeal is limited to urban areas
From our
analyses, we noted that the DAP made up 17 of the top 20 biggest majority wins,
with PKR and Amanah bagging 2 and 1 seat(s) respectively. What this means is that while DAP’s wins were
very significant (majority exceeding 50,000 in 18 seats), it appears to be
strong only in the larger urban seats in Peninsula Malaysia. It still has a
long way to go in East Malaysia where local parties clearly dominate. DAP is
still feared in the “green wave” states – opponents have successfully made DAP
the bogeyman in this GE. And very likely in the next?
Conversely,
PN won narrowly in 13 of the 23 slimmest majority seats. Interestingly, in the
PN narrow win seats, many were just by less than 800 votes. We’re not sure if
the competition had insisted on recounts as some 10 seats could have gone
either way given the slimmest of margins. Maybe even the postal votes could
have made the difference ?
6. Race and religion baiting won the
day for PN
It is
obvious that there is a great divide in our diverse population both in terms of
race (and religion) and urban vs rural voters. We have not up-played the racial
voting pattern in our analyses to avoid threading on sensitive grounds.
None of
the “good stuff” done by PH in its 22 months of power like arresting graft,
reducing seepages in the economy, implementing transparency and governance,
imposing higher standards of public accountability, improving health and social
infrastructure, enhancing public interest bodies and indeed, going after the “bad
guys”………..mattered at all in the rural areas.
Malaysia’s
rural folks are more interested in the price of chicken, eggs and whether they
will go to the right heaven, or not at all.
As the
title of this essay suggests, the effects of gerrymandering once again drove
the skewered results of this GE. To put this into an absolute shocker: The BN
and GPS won a total of 61 seats with the number of votes less than the folks in
the constituencies of Bangi, Kota Raja, Damansara, Subang and Tebrau who got
themselves 5 parliamentarians.
We are
hopeful that the incoming government will consider seriously our observations
and have some solutions for the ordinary Rakyat who seek to be fairly
represented in Parliament.
(Ramesh
Rajaratnam and CK Loh are keen observers of Malaysian politics)
