KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 13 — The Electoral Reform Committee (ERC) presented its interim report on electoral reforms to the Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad today.

Its chairman Tan Sri Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman said the full report shall be submitted to Dr Mahathir by August 2020, two years after the ETC was set up in August 2018.

"The ERC’s main task is to provide recommendations to ensure elections in Malaysia is properly conducted in accordance with standards in developed democratic countries that enjoy full public confidence,” he said in a statement.

"To this end, the ERC had conducted intensive research since its inception with a focus on 15 specific components based on the objective to achieve a proper democratic election.

"ERC had carried out its mandate to conduct research on electoral systems and laws, including making comparisons with developed democratic countries,” he added.

He said ERC has organised 21 stakeholders’ engagement sessions since then, and are satisfied with the feedback received from the civil societies, public and political parties involved.

Among the 15 items discussed are the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, proposal to announce the date of the next general election earlier, as well as forming an Electoral Boundary Committee for redelineation exercise.

Abdul Rashid proposed that the FPTP system be retained for state seats, while the parliamentary seats be decided by the party-list proportional representation system to ensure fairness.

Under the current system, the winning coalition tends to have more seats in the Dewan Rakyat in proportion to popular votes won.

Under the proposed proportional representation system, a party will be allocated seats based on the proportion of votes they win in each state.