Dari laman fb Danny Liew (dengan izin)
Gerrymandering is always a contentious subject that had been put forth as one of the 'tools' that are used by the 'regime' to ensure their continuous control over this beautiful country via our election system. It is so contentious that DAP Secretary-General, Lim Guan Eng was quoted to have said recently that he would push for one-person-one-vote system to be introduced in Malaysia if Pakatan Harapan wins the election.
What is claimed as the most glaring evidence that is being used to prove the existence of gerrymandering in Malaysia is the fact that Parliamentary seats located in Selangor have very high number of voters, as compared to Sarawak.
The following parliamentary seats, according to Roketkini, has the highest number of voters.
P102 Serdang ->178,790 voters
P106 Damansara -> 164,322 voters
P110 Klang --> 149,348 voters
P111 Kota Raja --> 149,021 voters
The 4 smallest seats that I managed to identify from MKini website are:
P207 Igan --> 19,592
P203 Lubok Antu --> 20,801
P210 Kanowit --> 21,022
P222 Lawas --> 21,297
So how is this possible? A person would be asking why does a person's vote in, say Igan, is equal to the value of 9 person's vote in Serdang? And often this is presented as evidence of gerrymandering, as rural voters tend to gravitate to the ruling party.
This article will not be able to address all the issues about gerrymandering. It will only answer half of the problem, or worse, open new can of worms.
This article came about from a short banter with Suzainur K A Rahman, on what is gerrymandering. I gave her an example why I say that the one-person-one-vote system itself is a gerrymandering too. So let us have a look.
The data on total voters is obtained from EC website, while the population data is an estimated population of Malaysia as in 2017, and obtained from DOSM website.
We can see that the 3 states with the largest number of seats are Sarawak (31), Sabah (25), and Johor (26).
Before we go any further, we need to make several assumptions:
1. There is no MA63 to dictate the allocation of seats to Sabah and Sarawak.
2. Parliamentary seat can go across existing established political borders, ie if a seat located in Selangor does not have prerequisite headcount, the seat can be combined with the bordering seat in Negeri Sembilan.
3. The total parliamentary seat of 222 is fixed.
If we were to implement 1-person-1-vote, we will derive at each Parliamentary seat must have a total of 67,300 voters. Looks fair, right when compared to having 178,790 voters in Serdang.
Let's see the net effect of the move.
Selangor will be having 36 seats as compared to the current 22 seats, a massive 14 seats gain. This is followed by Terengganu, with an addition of 3 seats.
The worst loser will be Sarawak. Sarawak will lose 13 seats, leaving only 18 seats. Sabah will lose 8 seats, leaving only 17 seats.
What we will be seeing here is the concentration of parliamentary power to 1 state, which is Selangor. This largely urbanised state will gain the most, while Sabah and Sarawak will suffer the worst. Both will find themselves more difficult to fight for their rights if 1-person-1-vote system is implemented.
In terms of development, this may have severe repercussion as the power is now concentrated in 1 state which is largely urbanised. This will not augur well for states with large rural population. Funding from Federal Budget would be very likely to be concentrated to the Selangor.
Concurrently, with low or little power to get more funding for rural area, this would result probably a large scale migration of population from rural areas nationwide to urbanised areas. This will probably result in the growth of slum area in these urbanised area, which will not augur well for the country as a whole.
Government machinery located in these urbanised area may also have difficulties to cope with the larger population.
If this system is unfair, especially to rural population, what is fair then?
Like I said earlier, I will not be able to provide all the answer to you. But let's see what we can understand from the same set of data.
In terms of voters population for each state, we can see that Terengganu, Perak and Perlis are the most politically-conscious states. More than 60% of their population are registered voters. While it does not address the seats allocation nationwide, it does bring up some new questions. With Sabah and WP Labuan having less than 30% of their population registered as voters, would it mean that they should be having more seats? Maybe?
As I didn't get the answer to the questions that I have, I decided to compare the percentage seats allocated to each state versus the percentage of population of each state to overall Malaysian population. You will notice that both ratio does not fall too far away, except for the following:
1. Selangor (variance of -10.01%).
2. Sarawak (variance of 5.33%).
3. Perak (variance of 3.02%).
4. Pahang (variance of 1.16%)
Positive variance means the states are actually getting more seats as compared to their counterparts. While negative means they get less seats than their counterparts.
While Selangor does lose out in terms of representation, it gets back in term of being the most developed state in the country. Large swathe of the state has already been developed. It also gets spill-over effects for development in WP Kuala Lumpur and WP Putrajaya. Of course, in a way, both WP were formerly part of Selangor.
For all other less urbanised states, this means that they get to have more voice. Especially in the case of Sarawak, Sarawak itself is about the same size as the whole of Peninsular Malaysia.
Some might point out that the seats in Sarawak too have large variance in terms of voters. Urbanised seats have voters between 50,000 to 100,000. But this does not point to gerrymandering. The fact that even development with Sarawak itself is not evenly spread out. Hence, forcing this discrepancy in terms of voting population.
Another important factor to consider when discussing about gerrymandering would be the existing political administrative system on the ground. If you take note, many of the parliamentary areas are within existing boundary of the existing political administrative system. Hence, it would be difficult to separate these out without having to cross-over to other administrative system. (examples are why Putrajaya itself is a seat and not combined into any other seats in Selangor).
Conclusion is, there is no single perfect system. Some of you may have been hoping that I would be giving a verdict either to condemn or support the how the political boundaries are drawn. That is not the intention. The intention is for me to be able to get this out in writing so that it stops bothering me. And at least I get to see this in both qualitatitve and quantitative ways.
Source:
EC website (for population of voters for each state)
MKini website (for population of voters on certain seats)
Roketkini (for the 4 largest voter population)
Department of Statistics Malaysia website (for estimated Malaysian population as at 2017)
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