EC's redelineation causing more malapportionment, analyst claims

GEORGE TOWN, Jan 18 — The Election Commission's (EC) proposed redelineation exercise will sustain malapportionment in constituents nationwide and may even make it worse, political and social analyst Dr Wong Chin Huat said today.

Wong said the electorate in 36 parliamentary seats and 87 state seats nationwide were malapportioned with either over or under-representations of an average of 33 per cent.

"These constituencies do not comply with the provisions under the Federal Constitution sub-section 2(c) which demands approximately equal apportionment with a measure of weightage for area and attention paid to inconveniences and maintenance of local ties," he said.

The researcher from Penang Institute along with his team consisting of Datuk Dr Toh Kin Woon, Yeong Pey Jung, Nidhal Mujahid and Ooi Kok Hin presented evidence on the worsening malapportionment of the electorate in many constituencies nationwide, in the form of charts and figures, at a press conference today.

He claimed the EC's recommendations are flawed in two major ways, in which it had sustained the non-compliance with the sub-section 2(c) or had caused non-compliance with sub-section 2(c).

For the parliamentary constituencies, Wong said the EC had maintained the malapportionment of a total 33 constituencies in which 16 are over-represented and 17 are under-represented.

The EC's recommendations had caused three other seats, all in Selangor, to be under-represented.

For example, Wong said EC recommendations would change P121 Lembah Pantai's electorate from being just above average to being under-sized by more than 10 per cent, while doing the same to the already under-sized P119 Titiwangsa and P118 Setiawangsa electorates.

As for state constituencies, the malapportionment of 78 state seats have been maintained while the EC had caused nine state seats to be malapportioned through its recommendations.

In Penang, he said the EC did not make any recommendations to change any of the constituencies but it had maintained the seven state seats that were already malapportioned.

For example, N34 Paya Terubong is considered over-sized by about 33 per cent while N33 Air Itam is under-sized by about 15 per cent.

"We want the EC to explain why it did not comply with the Federal Constitution in the redelineation exercise as evidenced in our research," he said.