For over three decades, Malaysian academics, civil society activists and opposition leaders have been calling for major reforms of Malaysia’s electoral system to level the playing field, and for an independent Elections Commission that would engender public confidence.
Studies, reports, and journal articles have been written about Malaysia’s electoral system which, through a series of reforms and re-delineation exercises since the 1970s, has led to an ethnic and political bias that has privileged the ruling party.
Thus, many long unresolved issues continue to mar the ability of the Elections Commission to deliver and supervise free and fair elections in Malaysia.
The most important is the re-delineation of constituencies which, since 1974, has persistently advantaged the ruling party through practices known as mal-apportionment (unequal constituency sizes in terms of population or electorate) and gerrymandering (drawing constituency boundaries to favour a particular party or group).
Other issues include the persistent allegations of “phantom voters” and “missing voters” in the electoral rolls; the grossly unequal access to the mass media, be it the newspapers which are controlled by components in the ruling coalition, or over radio and television; the inadequate supervision of postal votes; the short campaign period which was reduced from just over a month before 1970 to eight days in the 2004 elections; the use of government facilities and employees for campaigning ... and the list goes on.
Re-delineation of constituencies often tends to benefit the party in power in many parts of the world.
In Malaysia, the Elections Commission is guided by a list of constitutional principles in the Thirteenth Schedule which includes ensuring approximate equal numbers of voters within each constituency in a state, weightage to rural constituencies, and taking into consideration inconvenience resulting from alterations to constituencies and to the maintenance of local ties.
In 1962, the maximum allowable difference between voters in a rural and urban constituency was 50%. As the rural areas developed over the decades, Malaysia’s electoral system should increasingly move towards the constitutional principle of equal size constituencies. But this limitation was removed by 1973, resulting in a consistent increase of Malay-majority state and parliamentary constituencies between the 1959 and 1999 general elections.
This excessive rural weightage erodes the principle of “one person one vote”. Effectively a vote in an urban constituency is of much less value than the rural one. Given the rapid urbanisation of Malaysia, urban citizens are effectively under-represented electorally.
For example, in 1986 the largest constituency in Peninsular Malaysia had 81,005 voters and the smallest 23,979. By 2004, this disparity increased to 104,185 voters in the largest constituency and 23,061 in the smallest, a 451% disparity! If Putrajaya with its 5,079 voters is included, the disparity is even bigger.
Since the rural seats were dominated by Malay voters and urban seats by non-Malays, a common criticism is made that the persistent rural weightage was meant to benefit the ruling party.
But the 1999 general election results saw their popular votes dropping by almost 10%. This led the government to undertake the most extensive electoral engineering since 1974 – designed to protect the Barisan Nasional’s dominance and to strengthen Umno in the Malay heartland against the PAS onslaught.
The delineation exercise of 2002 was seen as highly politicised, as it appeared designed to address the loss of support in the Malay heartland of Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu. Strongholds of Johor and Sabah were given the most number of additional seats, while opposition-controlled Kelantan and Terengganu got none.
Kedah saw extraordinary redrawing of constituencies to address the fall of popular votes to 45% in parliamentary seats and 39.8% in state seats in the 1999 elections. The solution was gerrymandering.
Re-delineation saw the moving of “safe voters” in traditional Umno strongholds into constituencies won by PAS or by Umno with small margins.
In “safe state seats”, non-Malay voters were shifted into different parliamentary seats to strengthen Umno and weaken PAS.
This redistribution of non-Malay votes occurred not just in Kedah, but also across the country, thus reversing a long-standing trend of creating Malay dominant constituencies (over 60% of voters are Malays) in favour of more mixed constituencies where the Malays make up no more than 60% of the electorate.
The conventional wisdom was that the non-Malays would vote for Umno rather than the Islamist PAS, recognising the pivotal non-Malay support in delivering victories to the Barisan Nasional in the 1999 general election.
Thus creating more mixed seats would deliver better likelihood of victory to the Barisan in future elections, so the thinking went.
This exercise actually made for a more equitable representation of Malays, Chinese and Indian voters in the electoral system, reversing the ethnic bias of past re-delineation exercises.
As designed, the 2004 general election saw the Barisan making significant gains. In Kedah, Umno won back seven of the eight parliamentary seats it had lost to PAS in 1999 and gained seven more state seats.
At the national level, the trend of Barisan winning best in mixed seats continued. But data analysis done by academics showed that the significant gains, especially in popular votes made in 2004, could not just be due to re-delineation as they were considerably more than the numbers of “safe voters” reallocated into different constituencies.
Other factors, especially the promise of hope and change brought in by a new Prime Minister, swung the popular vote back. Thus, at best, the transfer of “safe voters” and the shifting of “safe state seats” between parliamentary constituencies could only help to increase the margins of victory.
By 2008, the public mood swung again. All the gerrymandering and mal-apportioning of constituencies were not enough to save the Barisan from losing control of four more states, the Federal Territory, and losing its two-thirds majority in Parliament.
Mixed seats fell to the Opposition with non-Malays voting for PAS candidates, and Malays voting for the DAP and Keadilan.
All these brought only short-term gain. In the longer term, these moves may have bitten back the hand that conjured them.
This government truly will be better served if it concentrates on delivering its promises of change to regain public support instead of spending its energies and exhausting its state apparatus enacting and re-enacting policies to reinforce its power base, and portraying every challenge to unjust laws and policies as a threat to everything under the midday sun.
The challenge is for the Prime Minister to use all his influence to bring his supporters on board his mission of ‘People First Performance Now’ and translate that into real deeds that respond to the people’s demands for change.
Read full text at http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp?col=sharingthenation&file=/2011/8/7/columnists/sharingthenation/9247162&sec=Sharing The Nation
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