Thank goodness the general election is over. By now, most people would just turn away from the excitement, tension, confusion that come with the sound and fury of an intense election campaign, heave a sign of relief, and go back to whatever they were doing before all this political mumbo jumbo started.

Only the print media is still flooded with election reports and analysis. It will be so for many days to come. There is no end to the blow-by-blow account of so many electoral battles on the ground, and to the speculations of so many political careers made or broken over merely eight days.

The new prime minister has now consolidated his position, both within BN and Umno. He is under intense pressure to deliver his election pledges of working with you and me, for you and me. I wonder how he sleeps at night. However he sleeps, I am probably the last thought on his mind.

While the victors celebrate their success with zeal akin to Dionysian rupture, the vanquished mourn their loss with heart rending grief.

The world loves winners and abhors losers. In a world where might tends to be right, the power of winning is often equated with the vindication of the winners' moral righteousness. "The people have spoken", so they say. You can almost see the halo around the head of the victors. In contrast, the losers seem to have done nothing right, and their decline and eventual demise are all too eagerly predicted.

Unpredictable world of politics

Fortunately, things are not what they seem in the intractable complex unpredictable world of politics.

For instance, I am not convinced that Umno has really routed PAS in the Malay heartland and elsewhere, and that we have already seen the back of political Islam in Malaysia. PAS onslaught has been halted, for the time being, but Tok Guru et al are not likely to roll over and die just yet.

Likewise, the Chinese voters have not swung to the opposition DAP en bloc either. The election results can hardly be described as a glorious victory for them, except for their two strongmen, Karpal Singh and Lim Kit Siang. The number of their "safe" seats is shrinking, and the quality of political leadership among their younger echelon is suspect.

So far, I have avoided commenting on the performance of individual parties, or the consequence of their rise and fall. Political parties here are strange creatures, and defy all manners of criticism and predictions.

I find it particularly difficult to criticise the opposition parties. I should know better than most Malaysians the kind of risks and pitfalls that litter the long road of opposition politics. One wishes them well.

Besides, working in a siege environment, many opposition leaders and their followers do not take criticisms favourably. They have been so conditioned to fighting fiercely for their principle and conviction, that often they cannot tell friends from foes, and therefore fight against their friends more fiercely than their foes. That itself deserves some comments later, after the level of adrenalin in their system has subsided.

For the moment at least, I am more interested in the rules of the game and the integrity of the referees, rather than the merits and demerits of the teams and their players.

EC exposes itself

In this respect, for the purpose of promoting meaningful reflections on democratic practices in Malaysia, the Election Commission (EC) has done us the greatest favour of exposing all their partiality, incompetence and weaknesses in the recent general election.

Many among us who have been actively involved in electoral politics have known all the aberrations for decades. I, for one, have been a victim of such aberrations in 1995.

Mysteriously, on polling day, names of voters who have voted many times in the past have disappeared from the electoral roll. Worse still, their names have been moved to a neighbouring constituency, or one that is hundred of miles away.

Your virulent protest on the scene will only draw the bland bureaucratic response that you should have checked with the electoral register long ago, and that you can still change back to your old address during the next voter registration exercise. The assumption is that everything wrong with the deprivation of your voting right is entirely due to your own fault, and the EC cannot be wrong.

Then again, on closer scrutiny, you find 50 to100 new voters registered to a single address, when none of the local people know any of these mysterious new-comers.

In a big city with a sizeable transient population like Kuala Lumpur, the appearance of mysterious new voters can at least be partially explained by the presence of a mobile workforce. But even in isolated remote longhouses of Sarawak, you still find on polling day hoards of strange faces being ferried by boats and buses to a local polling station to vote, when obviously none has ever been a local resident.

Anybody who tries to stop these alien invaders from voting will inevitably be subject to police arrests and subsequent charges in court. Tian Chua and Ezam were the latest victims in the Lunas by-election.

Then there is the eternal complaint about one's IC number being written on the counterfoil of the ballot paper. Now that votes are counted by polling stream right on the spot at the end of polling day, the polling trend of any one neighbourhood is also easily known to all. In principle at least, your vote is not secret, and therefore not free.

The list goes on. You could make numerous police reports about all these anomalies, but we all know about police reports in this sort of things. Their investigation takes time, a very long time, like forever.

Horror stories up close

You could take the matter to court of course, especially if you are the opposition candidate, and have been the most obvious injured party.

Unfortunately, the Malaysian election court has never been known for ruling against Barisan candidates. The successes of such election petitions are few and far between.

What people fail to realise is that failure in such election petitions can incur for the poor opposition candidate a heavy burden of paying for the court costs amounting to tens of thousands. It may take years to pay back the debt incurred.

I was an election candidate eight times. I have known these horror stories at close quarters. I know that in a close contest, all these anomalies in addition to police interference, the rumour mongering, the intimidation and the various forms of vote buying - can easily cause the defeat of the opposition candidates.

Playing with these absurd disadvantages and in such uneven playing field, I used to plunge headlong into these contests by giving my BN opponent a handicap of 3000 to 5000 votes even before the campaign period started. This margin of handicap is already bigger than the number of votes procured by the winning BN candidate in a rural constituency.

This brings me to the crux of the electoral injustices in Malaysia. The electoral laws and structures have been abused to ensure overwhelming advantage to the ruling parties. The powers and independence of the EC have been severely curtailed through mindless and unjustifiable amendments to our nation's constitutions. Today, the EC looks and sounds like a department under the Prime Minister's Office.

Gerrymandering

The key to political power here is gerrymandering. Every eight years or so, the EC would be made to redraw the boundaries of all constituencies in such a way, that the BN will be assured of more representation in Parliament, and then their hold on power would be perpetuated with successive delineation exercises.

In the sixties and seventies, gerrymandering was aimed at consolidating Umno's ideology of Malay dominance. The Chinese lived mostly in the cities and towns, and the Malays were to be found in rural areas. In line with the idea of positive discrimination, weightage was given to rural constituencies. The number of voters in a rural constituency could be 50% of that in an urban constituency.

There is something to be said for rural weightage on electoral representation. The one-man-one-vote principle reflects a kind of historical aspiration for universal justice, but it does not always work out that way.

Even in the US presidential election, the complex system of primaries and caucuses, and the eventual deciding body of this mysterious Electoral College that will determine who the next American president shall be, do not honour the principle of one-man-one-vote.

Nevertheless, despite this rural weightage given to the rural population, the socio-economic gaps between the urban and the rural people have widened. The justification for this weightage has been completely defeated. Today, this over-representation of the rural votes is but an instrument for Umno to control Parliament with increasing ease.

Even the 50% weightage was removed in the 70s through an act of parliament. There is now no limit in the difference of number of votes between any two constituencies. That is how we get this ridiculous situation, where the votes obtained by the winning candidate in Putrajaya is less than 15% of the votes procured by each of the two candidates in the Kota Melaka constituency.

All you have to do is to go through the number of voters in all the 219 parliamentary constituencies with the help of a calculator, and you will see easily that some people are proportionately over-represented than others.

Standard practice

Today, this is not an issue that concerns our racial balance of power merely. With the rise of Malay based opposition parties like PAS and Keadilan, the same trick of gerrymandering has been used to ensure an unfair advantage for the BN.

It does not help to say that gerrymandering is the standard practice of democracies all over the world. I also admit that, if the opposition parties in Malaysia come to power, they will also most likely tinker with electoral permutation in their favour. Without proper weightage, rational guidelines, and basic rules subject to public discussions and democratic scrutiny, unfair or limitless weightage is moral corruption.

All the ills of our electoral process are the symptoms of a deep-seated political and moral corruption that has become the unquestioned axioms of democratic practices. They manifest our acceptance of the corrupt idea, that - as far as the pursuit of power is at stake - all means justify the end.

The new PM wants to get rid of corruption. The first place for him to start would be a drastic review of all the laws, institutions, and practices concerned with general elections. In fact, corruption in the process of voting is the mother of all other forms of political corruptions in the country.