[ipjps] A win for the opposition is nearly impossible - Philip Bowring
Sunday, May 19, 2013 1:36 PM
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Malaysia's Rigged Electoral System [Print]
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index2.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=\
5425pop=1page=0Itemid=178 [E-mail]
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index2.php?option=com_contenttask=emailfor\
mid=5425itemid=178 Written by Philip BowringFriday, 17 May 2013
The playing fireld for Malaysia's next GE
A win for the opposition is nearly impossible
As the smoke clears after the Malaysian election battle it has become
clear that under the current electoral system defeat of the ruling
Barisan Nasional (BN) was never quite on the cards, even without the
electoral roll and election day cheating and vote buying claimed by the
opposition.
Indeed all other factors being equal it would probably take another 4
percent swing against the BN for the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR)
coalition to win the majority of seats.
As it was this was a remarkable victory for the PR which won 51.7
percent of the popular vote and 53 percent in under-represented
peninsula Malaysia. Yet it took only 89 seats compared to the BN's 133
seats. Those numbers tell the tale of just how rigged the system has
become.
Each BN seat cost an average of 39,400 votes while each PR one cost
63,200. Those figures show the success of years of outrageous BN
gerrymandering which has made nonsense of democratic, one-man one-vote
principles. The extent of this has gone almost unnoticed by the foreign
media - and foreign government reaction, treating the result as though
it were the outcome of a relatively normal democratic process.
Gerrymandering on Malaysia's epic scale is just as undemocratic as the
ballot-counting frauds which President Ferdinand Marcos used to turn
defeat into claimed victory during his years as president of the
Philippines.
Given the BN's control of most media and the machinery of government,
the result was a remarkable victory for the PR. So although there is
much disappointment and some youthful anger among the ranks of the PR
that is because expectations of what could be achieved were naturally
over-optimistic. Assuming the PR holds together till the next general
elections it will probably need to begin to reverse the gerrymander - or
break the Barisan - if it is to break UMNO's stranglehold on power.
More immediately the opposition and its component, Anwar Ibrahim's
Parti Keadilan Rakyat in particular, is focused on the cheating alleged
to have taken place in a significant number of constituencies whether
through giving ballots to non-nationals, voting more than once,
manipulating the electoral roll or simply offering cash to those who
prove they voted for the BN. The PKR says that as 27 seats were won by
the BN with a majority of less than 5 percent of the vote, cheating
could have made a critical difference. Certainly in some of the more
closely fought contests, the arithmetic somehow seemed to favor the BN.
Thus it was declared the winner in no less than 11 of the 15 seats where
the margin was less than 1,000 votes and in 25 of the 35 seats where
the margin was under 2,000 votes. This may or not have been chance.
Nonetheless given the other factors favoring the BN, cheating would
have had to be on a more substantial scale than has been shown to be
the case so far, and to have been well-targeted - some alleged
instances occurred in constituencies where the BN was never under
threat.
So looking ahead the PR must find some way to raise not just awareness
but real anger at how the democratic process has been undermined to
protect the BN's politics of corruption and patronage. Some of the
numbers are quite startling thanks to Dr Mahathir's getting rid of the
rules which once governed the relative size of constituencies. Thus
today the largest constituency PKR held, Kapar in Selangor, had an
electorate
