An imaginary address to malapportionment

ARCHIVES 2011

By admin-s On Dec 5, 2011

By Lee Wee Tak

The famous retiree, Mr. Ng Chak Ngoon has certainly attracted national attention with his malapportionment bombshell in the PSC hearing for electoral reform in Sabah. With BN only needing around 15% of the votes to secure a simple majority in parliament, no wonder Najib expressed his confidence in the just concluded UMNO AGM that UMNO will win the general election yet again.

Inspired by Mr. Ng’s call, I did some number crunching over the weekend. And I found a near prefect “75% – 25%” rule at work.

Total number of registered voters for GE2008 was 10,923,140 (that would include people above 100 years old voters as well as phantom voters as well) and the total number of parliamentary seats is 222. In order to truly reflect 1 voice 1 vote a parliamentary constituency should be made up to 49,199 (ie. 10,923,140 divided by 222) or round up to 50,000 voters per seat.

As the 75% – 25% rule is at work, you will note that

# 75% of the parliamentary constituencies have registered voters below 50,000

# 25% of the parliamentary constituencies have registered voters above 50,000

Of the 75% constituencies with less than 50,000 registered voters – 75% of the seats are won by BN (remaining 25% go to PR)

Of the 75% constituencies with more than 50,000 voters – 75% of the seats are won by PR (remaining 25% go to BN)

If you look at the top 24 seats, you will find 79% of the seats are won by PR with majority many times over total registered voters of Putrajaya (a mere 6,608 with 5,416 turned out to vote – just fill up stadium hoki Tun Razak whose capacity is 5,000)

So what if I play with the number of voters in Selangor in an imaginary re-delineation exercise? Working with 50,000 voters per constituency, with a 15% tolerance factor as proposed by Bersih:

· The 15% tolerance range dictate that an average constituency size should consist of between 42,500 to 57,500 number of registered voters

· For example, if you look at Kelana Jaya, PJ Utara dan Selatan, Subang and Shah Alam, total number of registered voters there is 389,206 – given 9 seats, the average number of voters per seat should be 43,243 within the range of the above range, instead of the present 5 seats only.

· The above would be similar to size of certain BN seats such as Tawau (42,560 registered voters), Kota Belud (43,071), Kuala Pilah (42,328), Alor Gajah( 54,097) and Jempol (53,478).

· Number of seats in Selangor should be increased from the present 22 seats (5 seats to BN and 17 seats to PR) to 32. Base on present seats ratio as well as voting trend BN would have circa 20% of the seats; the revised parliamentary seats should be 7 to BN and 25 to PR.

* before certain people jump on me, yes it is purely a numerical exercise but in reality there are a lot of other factors to determine boundaries but not withstanding that, the general picture should look like above and not like now!