In May 2013, Ramesh Rajaratnam wrote an article showing the effects of the gross distortions inherent in our voting system as reflected by the results of the then 13th general election (GE). He opined that until this distortion is rectified, it will always be an uphill task for a party that is deemed an under-dog in any GE simply due to the malapportionment and delineation within our electoral system. It was most disheartening to note that after 8 years and 2 further GEs, the Election Commission (EC) recently said that there will not be any further delineation (electoral alignment) until 2026. Hopefully we will not see another GE before that.
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)
