How many seats in Parliament? How many for Sarawak? Says who?
On what basis should the number of seats in Parliament be decided?
Rama Ramanathan
In the last three decades, businesses worldwide have crystallised how to think in terms of processes.
A process takes inputs and converts them into outputs. For example, the process in a rubber glove factory converts latex and a bunch of other materials into a packaged rubber glove.
The Federal Constitution of Malaysia, like the Constitutions of many nations around the world, prescribes a process for deciding how citizens will determine who will govern Malaysia.
The Constitution requires the process to be performed by the Election Commission (EC). The Constitution establishes the EC as a body independent of the government.
The Constitution requires the EC to ensure that every citizen has an equal chance of deciding who will represent him or her in the Federal Parliament and in State Assemblies.
The inputs are data prescribed by the Federal and State Constitutions.
The data includes the number of seats in Parliament and in each State Assembly, and this is what I want to focus on in this article. As my purpose is to illustrate a principle, most of my remarks will be about the Federal government.
Article 46 of the Constitution states that there shall be a total of 222 elected Members of Parliament (MP) and specifies the number of MP’s from each state.
For instance, the Constitution stipulates that Sarawak shall have 31 members (the maximum from any state) and Perlis shall have 3 members (the smallest from any state, not counting Federal Territories; KL has 11 members).
To change the total number of members in Parliament, and the number of members from each state, a Bill must be passed in Parliament with a two-thirds majority.
The EC has said that it will soon release new boundaries for constituencies. Yet the EC is silent about the number of seats in Parliament and the distribution by state.
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