DAP veteran leader Lim Kit Siang said that the changes, which he described as gerrymandering, favoured Barisan Nasional and had resulted in Sarawak DAP losing five of the 12 seats it previously held.
Lim congratulated Sarawak BN leader Adenan Satem for the party’s convincing victory, taking 72 seats in the 82-seat assembly. The DAP was returned in seven seats and PKR was re-elected to three seats.
He claimed that Adenan’s forecast of winning at least 70 seats had been based on gerrymandering in redrawing the state assembly seat boundaries.
He pinpointed Alan Ling Sie Kiong, the Sarawak DAP secretary, as “the greatest victim of such BN-created constituencies” for his defeat in Piasau.
Ling, dubbed a giant-killer, had won the seat in 2011 by defeating George Chan, then SUPP president, with a majority of 1,590 votes. On Saturday, he was unseated by SUPP secretary Sebastian Ting who won a comfortable 2,112-vote majority, polling 7,799 votes against Ling’s 5,687.
Piasau was one of the seats involved in the Election Commission’s (EC) redelineation of state assembly seats last year, in which 12 new seats were created.
In a statement issued at a news conference in Kuching today, Lim also blamed lower turnout as a factor in the party’s defeat.
He said Sarawak DAP could have retained the 12 state assembly seats from 2011 if the voter turnout had been closer to the 76.3 percent turnout for the 2013 parliamentary election. He claimed that voter turnout yesterday was only 68.1 percent. However, the Election Commission said today that the turnout was 70.1 percent, or the same level as at the 2011 election.
Kit Siang said the DAP would remain committed to political change and would seek to have a full slate of Chinese, Dayak and Malay representatives in the Sarawak State Assembly.
He said Sarawak DAP was prepared for the long haul and would stick to its aim of forming the next state government in Sarawak.