Calvin Sankaran
The redelineation of the electoral boundaries by the Election Commission (EC) has unleashed a firestorm of protests from Pakatan Harapan (PH) politicians as well as various civil society organisations.
The major complaint is that electoral boundaries have been redrawn to give the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) government an unfair advantage in the upcoming 14th General Election (GE14).
Maria Chin, formerly the chairperson of Bersih 2.0, denounced the redelineation as the ‘biggest cheating to ever happen”.
Long-time observer of Malaysian politics, Bridget Welsh went even further by claiming “it is by the far the worst case of electoral manipulation in Malaysia’s history and one of the most egregious in the world”.
While a lot of comments and criticisms have been made, very few of these have been quantitative in nature. Even analyses which used data – for example by the Penang Institute and Tindak Malaysia – were done superficially and was often politically slanted.
As such, I would like to offer an unbiased, facts-based analysis of the redelineation exercise.
It is important to note that the scope of my analysis is strictly limited to determining if the EC’s redrawing of the electoral boundaries will provide an advantage to the ruling coalition in the upcoming GE14.
This analysis does not address the larger issue of the fairness of the Malaysian electoral system itself.
The data I have used for my analysis is mainly based on the EC’s Redelineation Report as well as other official government statistics readily available online.
Unlike many of the commentators on this issue, I have gone through each and every page of the EC’s report on the redelineation exercise containing more than 1000 pages.
Background
Firstly, it is instructive to look at the background of the matter and the process used by the EC to arrive at the final Redelineation Report.
The whole exercise started after the 2013 general election and was completed in mid 2016. The first recommendation was gazetted on Sept 15, 2016.
Subsequently the EC displayed the recommendation to the public at 252 locations nationwide from Sept 15 to Oct 14 to receive feedback, objections or inquiries.
During this period, the EC received 804 representations out of which 430 were deemed to have met the conditions as specified by Article 13 of the Federal Constitution and accepted for local inquiries.
The local inquiries for all Peninsular Malaysian states (excluding Selangor) were conducted from Oct 31, 2016 to Feb 28, 2017.
Based on those inquiries, the EC came up with the second recommendation which was gazetted on March 8, 2017. This revised recommendation was once again displayed to the public from March 8 to April 7, 2017 at 153 locations.
This time there were 133 representations received out of which 111 were deemed as valid. The second round of local inquiries were held from April 17 to August 9, 2017.
Meanwhile the first round of local inquiries for Selangor was held from Dec 27, 2017 to January 9, 2018. The second recommendation was displayed for the public from Jan 15 to Feb 14, 2018
In summary a total of 600 out of 1,685 representations received met the requirements of Article 13 of the Federal Constitution and were accepted by the EC.
Based on this feedback, the EC prepared the final report and submitted it to the Prime Minister on March 9, 2018. The report was then tabled in Parliament on March 22 and subsequently approved on March 28, 2018.
Preliminary analysis
Based on the final report, 98 out of the 165 parliamentary seats had changes to their boundaries, which meant that almost 60% of parliamentary seats in Peninsular Malaysia were affected.
Of these, Johor had the most changes at 19 seats, followed by Selangor (18), Perak (16), Kelantan (1), KL (10), Kedah (7), Melaka (5), Negeri Sembilan(4), Terengganu (4), Penang (2) and Pahang (2). Only Perlis had no changes to its parliamentary constituencies.
Of the 98 affected seats, 35 constituencies are currently held by BN, 23 by DAP, 21 by PKR, 11 by PAS, five by Amanah, two by Independents and one by PPBM.
Although 98 constituencies were affected, on deeper analysis, it was found that for 30 constituencies, redelineation was done at the state seat level or resulted only in name changes, with their boundaries remaining the same as before. As such the actual boundary changes only affected 68 out of 165 seats (41.2%).
To determine if the new redelineation exercise favoured BN, hypothesis testing was conducted to verify if:
1) The change in the number of voters exceeded the winning margin in the last election, and
2) The change will help BN either defeat their opponents or consolidate their existing positions.
Only if a majority of these changes passed both tests, can it be concluded that the redelineation indeed had been engineered with a political agenda to help BN win the upcoming GE.
Testing for hypothesis No 1
Let’s look at the 68 affected seats to see if the changes in boundaries has resulted in an increase/decrease in the number of voters exceeding the winning margin in the last GE.
Based on this test, it was found that a total of 22 seats passed the test (that is the change was more than the winning margin).
Of these, seven seats were located in Selangor, followed by four seats in FT, three seats in Perak, two seats each in Kedah, Kelantan and Melaka and one seat each in Terengganu and Johor.
Testing for hypothesis No 2
In this test, each of these 22 seats were examined to determine if the changes were made with the objective of providing an advantage to the ruling party (BN).
The in-depth analysis of the 22 seats can be summarised as below.
It was found that the new electoral boundaries potentially would enable BN to win eight more parliamentary constituencies.
These seats are P023 Rantau Panjang, P035 Kuala Nerus, P101 Hulu Langat, P109 Kapar, P116 Wangsa Maju, P121 Lembah Pantai, P124 Bandar Tun Razak and P137 Hang Tuah Jaya.
On the other hand, these changes also potentially help PAS win an additional seat at P022 Pasir Mas. This means on the overall a net gain of seven seats for BN.
Final conclusions
1. It was observed that the EC had solid logic for each and every one of these boundary changes. Their primary objective was to balance the number of voters among different constituencies within the same state.
This can be clearly seen from each change made by the EC as they provided detailed data on how they executed the voters’ rebalancing. The EC was open to suggestions and accepted hundreds of feedback and adjusted their final recommendation accordingly.
2. It was observed that these changes can indirectly help BN gain seven additional seats assuming it had the same level of support as in the previous GE.
However, it doesn’t make any sense to claim that the redelineation exercise was done with a political agenda as the gain for BN is minuscule (seven out of 195 seats or 3.6%).
If providing a clear electoral gain to BN was the agenda, then the EC would have changed far more seats and concentrated on marginal constituencies rather than initiating a sweeping and lengthy exercise.
3. The major complaint from the opposition and civil society groups was the issue of malapportionment where the gap between the number of voters in the rural and urban constituencies is large.
This is indeed a valid complaint but unless the total number of seats are increased, such balancing would not be possible. Also, such move would elicit strong protests from Sabah, Sarawak and other smaller/less dense states. As such, the EC wisely stayed clear of such a move.
4. The accusation that the redelineation is the game changer and that the ruling party had planned this to provide them an unassailable advantage for the upcoming GE cannot be supported by data and facts.
Those who made such claims are either ignorant of the facts or deliberately using it to undermine their political opponents (BN).
Calvin Sankaran is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.