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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Gerrymandering an Art or Science in Malaysia?

Do you think the Elections Commission is guilty of gerrymandering?
What that means is that the EC will create seat boundaries that can benefit certain parties or groups?

There was an interview with malaysiakini published that made some leaders unhappy.

Hoping that the work of the EC is beyond reproach and that they are all honourable men with great integrity, I decided to analyse the Parliamentary seats for the General Elections.
(click2 to enlarge)
This table shows the comparison of the average of the seats in each state.
The state with the highest average is Selangor and the lowest is Sarawak. The ratio between Selangor/Sarawak is 2.72 which means that Selangor voters are somewhat disfranchised as their representation has been effectively reduced.

Using the state with the lowest average (in our case, Sarawak), the number of seats that should be allocated to all other states are calculated with a more consistent bias like equal parity, 1.25 ratio and 1.50 ratio. Assuming that 1.25 is a reasonable ratio that can be applied to the nation, we are short of at least 50 parliamentary seats.

I suggest the work of the EC should be subject to a Parliamentary review and the EC should also publish its principles on which new seats are created and what basis they use to delineate new seats.


2 comments:

Alan Newman said...

UMNO is grossly unfair ! It is no coincidence that ‘Malay’ seats like Putrajaya (97%-98% Malay voters) have as low of 5,000 voters while ‘Chinese’ seats like Selayang have more than 120,000 voters. 120,000 lose to 5,000 !

Alan Newman said...

UMNO is grossly unfair ! It is no coincidence that ‘Malay’ seats like Putrajaya (97%-98% Malay voters) have as low of 5,000 voters while ‘Chinese’ seats like Selayang have more than 120,000 voters. 120,000 lose to 5,000 !