All Malaysians should want to see a "fair" electoral map, no matter whether they support BN or Pakatan Rakyat.

The Coalition for Free and Fair Election (Bersih) vice chairperson Thomas Fann said that it was with this hope that he voluntarily took up the challenge to rally all to actively help the  Election Commission (EC) redraw electoral boundaries.

Fann said after 13 elections and 56 years of independence, Malaysia was still considered a "young democracy." By surveying their own neighborhood, he hopes citizens will better understand their political rights.

"I don't want to say the table will be turned one day.... But if that happens, we will be working with BN. They will be the ones calling us to put pressure on Pakatan," he told Malaysiakini in an interview.

"When there is no free and fair elections - the possibility exists that the majority voice will not be considered also.”

Bersih has adopted a programme spearheaded by Fann, which aims to plant a Delineation Action and Research Team (DART), in all 222 Parliamentary constituencies.

Kicking off with a national roadshow on March 9 in Petaling Jaya, DART will roll out in Selangor, Johor, Kedah, Perak, Pahang and Sabah and Sarawak and hope that the movement catches on.

For this purpose, Bersih has recently appointed four new regional leaders to follow the election of a five-member steering committee headed by Maria Chin Abdullah last November.

Bersih is most famous for its street rallies in  2007, 2011 and 2012 which drew tens of thousands into the streets of Kuala Lumpur demanding that the government review the electoral system. Some of its eight key demands have been accepted by the EC.
            
DART to help, not hinder EC

Some may see DART as a pre-emptive political move to block EC from fast-tracking an already delayed new electoral map.

Following the constitution, the EC should redraw electoral boundaries every eight years and present it to the prime minister who will then seek Parliament’s stamp of approval. The electoral map used in last year’s election dates back to 2003-2005.

Meanwhile, Fann said the idea for DART came from an academician, Penang Institute's political scientist Wong Chin Huat.

In June last year, Wong called some friends together and gave evidence of how lopsided the electoral map looked. It was just shortly after the GE13 last year, which was riddled with allegations of irregularities and vote-buying.

Wong's study calculated that under the EC’s current map, any one political party can still win the majority of seats in Parliament by just garnering a third of the total votes. This is far from the democracy mantra that “every vote counts.”

In Johor alone, for example, some MPs were picked by 106,725 voters and others by only 37,714. Only three out of 24 Parliamentary seats in Johor fall into the proper “average” voting numbers of 52,000 to 71,000 seats.

There are also 14 state assembly seats that are bigger than the smallest parliamentary seat. In an odd occurrence, one family living in the same house were split into Segamat and Sekijang constituencies due to badly drawn boundaries.

"Everybody was down and we listened -we understood and saw the importance and we asked ourselves: What should we do?" said Fann.
 
They found the answer by taking a closer look at the Federal Constitution, which stated that 100 or more voters can object to EC's delineation. This can be filed within 30 days of the gazetting of a new map and it can be repeated once more after. Besides voters, local and state authorities can also file objections if their duties are affected.

"In that asking, we then developed this programme with simple steps - like a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) delineation project which was eventually adopted by Bersih," Fann said.    

Wong is now also Bersih's resource chairperson.

How DART works

DART mainly works by drawing together a group of 5-8 people who will go through a prepared checklist of 14 simple “errors”  to watch out for about their own constituency.

This include asking questions like if the electoral boundaries cut through housing estates, shops and factories or take away an area which should be part of the local community or if the constituency has more than one local authority.

DART would also strive to clean up the electoral list of voters for the EC.

The team then meets a couple more times, either for some legwork to visit the boundary areas or to draw their own map. After this, they are tasked to educate and prepare 100-120 voters to be ready to file a "standardised" protest letter to the EC, if needed.

Fann said that it is hoped that DART will actually help and not hinder EC's work.

"Our objective is to have a fairer delineation and not just to protest. Our intention is two-fold: to increase the quantity of objection and secondly, the quality of objection must increase substantially,” he said.

What would Bersih do if EC strikes off all objections as the commission did before? Bersih  was prepared to sue, Fann said.

"If our objections are thrown out without rhyme or reason, Bersih has stated that we will take legal action - the judiciary can actually make a decision based on law that EC is violating the constitution.”

But Fann was quick to clarify again that Bersih was not picking a fight.

"It is not that we want to take over the function of EC.”

"We really follow EC's guidelines as well but except that we found out going through the delineation that they don't follow their own guidelines and that's where we want to object."

Fann said he is aware that many will compare DART with another electoral reform group Tindak, which has plan to exert pressure on the EC. But he dismissed that the two were rivals, only that they had different ways of doing the same thing.

“The real strength is our checklist. Every constituency is different but our lawyers are coming up with a legal protest letter that they can copy and paste and have a strong legal objection.”

For more information. Go to Bersih's website.