Revelation by ex-EC chief showed its real dirty colours

It is the personal choice of former EC chief Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman to join Perkasa, and nothing much of our business. Nevertheless, he made the shocking statement that the redelineation of constituencies was meant to defend the special privileges of the Malays. Little wonder that Bersih 2.0 chairman Ambiga Sreenevasan hit out at him unapologetically, accusing his statement as confessing the EC is playing the gerrymandering game.

While I am not going to explain the term gerrymandering here as it has been explained in the press, we nevertheless need to further understand and explore this political tactic of using gerrymandering to produce a situation favorable to the gerrymanderers.

Gerrymandering is basically effectuated by means of two different strategies: maximizing the effective use of own party's vote bank while minimizing the effective use of other party's vote bank. While redelineating the constituencies, the support bases of specific political parties will be put "under siege" in a bid to manipulate the election outcome. To achieve this end, gerrymanderers adopt one or both of the following tactics:

1. Collective votes, i.e. to put the supporters of the other party into the sure-win constituencies of own party, resulting in collective waste of the ballots of the other party while achieving the objective of diluting the opposition votes.

2. Ballot dilution, i.e. to put the supporters of the other party in different constituencies through such redelineation exercises so that the other party would not be able to consolidate their support votes to win.

Such unfair tactics have been common in many so-called democratic countries, including the US, UK and Malaysia. As a matter of fact, after Clause 116 in the Federal Constitutions stating that the difference between the number of voters in various constituencies must not exceed 50% was abolished in 1973, our constituency redelineation works have since become a lego assembly game: any way we like it, resulting in vast disparities in the number of voters. For instance, there are only 15,000 voters in Putrajaya while Kapar has almost 150,000! With such a wide disparity, only Heaven knows whether the EC is playing the gerrymandering game.

The country's constituencies must be redelineated once every eight years to reflect changes to the population structure and development. The last redelineation was done in 2003 and by right it should have been done again in 2011 but because redelineation of parliamentary seats need to be passed by at least two thirds of MPs in the Parliament and the BN did not have this advantage back then, the whole thing was stalled until today.

With the BN now still holding a simple majority in the Parliament, the redelineation of constituencies will not be passed again in the Parliament if it doesn't satisfy the Opposition.

The Supreme Court in US had in 1964 ruled that redelineation of constituencies had to reflect the population ratio and meet the principles of equal weightage for every vote, fair delineation and appropriate population mix, etc.

The Voting Rights Act passed by the United States in 1965 states clearly that constituencies must not be redelineated in such a way unfavorable to the minorities. Actually such universally accepted redelineation principles should apply to Malaysia as well. Unfortunately, our former EC chairman is still living in a primitive age where redelineation of constituencies is harnessed to advance the interests of a specific ethnic group.

This is not just his personal woe, but a stigma of the Election Commission and an irony to the democratic politics in Malaysia.

By LIM MUN FAH
Translated by DOMINIC LOH