Election Commission (EC) chairperson Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof had announced in February this year that the commission is proposing a 15 to 20 percent increase in parliament and state seats, which include states such as Selangor, Johor, Perak, Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah (The Star, Feb 23, 2014).

What criteria does EC follow to increase seats by 15-20 percent? Why not at 25 percent or why not at 10 percent?

The EC is widely and deeply distrusted by the opposition and civil society. Its past redelineation exercises are deeply condemned for its flaws, but fewer have questioned the EC’s proposal of seat increase. In fact, many opposition leaders enthusiastically applaud seats increase, believing that this will help to address the vast disparity of electorate size across constituencies, caused by malapportionment.

Inter-state v intra-state malapportionment

Such naive wishful thinking that EC would help to reduce malapportionment with seats increase is likely due to an under-appreciation of the complexity between three issues - seats increase, inter-state malapportionment and intra-state malapportionment.

Most people like to cite the extreme examples of Kapar (144,158 voters at the time of the 13th general election or GE13) and Putrajaya (15,791 voters), nearly 10 times, in criticising the EC on malapportionment.

This is actually an instance of inter-state malapportionment, that is partially justified. Why? Putrajaya as a Federal Territory is a state-level unit, and therefore no parliamentary constituency can cross its border. Hence, no matter how few voters the state-level unit has, it must be given at least one constituency. At the time of its inception in 2003, the parliamentary constituency of Putrajaya had in fact only 85 voters.

If you really think Putrajaya should not have such a small constituency, then you should have objected to its establishment as a Federal Territory in 2001. We cannot just twist the rules at whim just because we dislike certain outcome.

The right question to ask then is, not “why is Putrajaya so small?”, but “why is Kapar so big?” Table 1 shows a comparison between Kapar, Putrajaya and also Sabak Bernam, Selangor’s smallest parliamentary constituency with only 37,318 only at the time of GE13.
 
Kapar had three times the number of voters of Sabak Bernam! Why? At the time of GE13, Selangor had 2,048,828 voters. Divided by 22 parliamentary constituencies, each constituency should have only 93,129 voters.

So, why was Kapar’s electorate size 155 percent of the state average while Sabak Bernam’s only 40 percent of the same average, making Kapar nearly four times Sabak Bernam in electorate size? This is intra-state apportionment.

Now, during GE13, the national average size of a parliamentary constituency was only 59,766 voters. Even if we take out Putrajaya, Labuan and also Sabah and Sarawak, which were historically promised over-representation, Selangor’s average of 93,129 was still vastly unreasonable. So, why is Selangor given only 22 parliamentary constituencies? This is inter-state apportionment.

So, is there anything in the federal constitution to prevent such outrageous violation of the ‘one person, one vote, one value’ principle?

Intra-state malapportionment

The federal constitution, Thirteenth Schedule, Part 1, Section 2 does provide a safeguard mechanism against intra-state malapportionment
 
(c) The number of electors within each constituency in a state ought to be approximately equal except that, having regard to the greater difficulty of reaching electors in the country districts and the other disadvantage facing rural constituencies, a measure of weightage for area ought to be given to such constituencies;
 
In earlier years, the constitution even set a cap of such discrepancy from the average, namely plus minus 15 percent from 1957 to 1962, and plus minus 33.33 percent from 1962 to 1973.

While the cap was completely removed with the constitutional amendment in 1973, it is clear that Section 2 can only be interpreted as:
(a) Equal apportionment within the same state is the rule
(b) Exception can be made but only in favour of rural constituencies
 
The EC simply threw the constitution out of the window and came up with its own malapportionment guide. Table 2 reproduces a five-category scheme published in the EC’s 2003 and 2005 redelineation reports.





Not only is it constitutionally defiant, the EC might also be arithmetically-challenged. So never mind that this classification is not mathematically erroneous (e.g. gaps between 59,000 to 59,999 for parliamentary constituencies and 24,000 to 24,999 for the states).

The most problematic flaw of this unconstitutional scheme is that it does not provide any criteria on what the EC means by ‘urban’, ‘semi-urban’ and ‘rural’. This opens the door for the EC to draw any constituency of any size they like.

As a result of the 2003 redelineation, in Kedah, the fishing port (P10) of Kuala Kedah had 73,942 voters and the mountainous (P16) Baling had 72,387 voters, while the state capital (P9) Alor Setar had only 56,007 voters.

Going by the EC scheme, Kuala Kedah and Baling would be metropolitan areas while Alor Setar was only a town!

Another ridiculous example would be the parliamentary constituency of Puchong in Selangor, which consists of two state constituencies, Sri Serdang and Kinrara. Table 3 shows Sri Serdang was nearly twice the size of its neighbour Kinrara.

Would anyone from Puchong agree that Sri Serdang (at the south, nearer to Dengkil) was more urban than Kinrara (next to Sri Petaling and OUG)? But then again, this is geography ala EC, for you!

Anyone serious about reducing malapportionment must first oppose the EC’s unconstitutional classification of urban and rural constituencies. On that, Bersih 2.0 is prepared to help affected voters to take the EC to court if the EC insists on perpetuating intra-state malapportionment.


MARIA CHIN ABDULLAH is the chairperson for the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections 2.0 (Bersih 2.0) and the executive director of Empower. She believes politicians are bad masters if not made good servants through free, fair and competitive elections.