How EC is tying the opposition’s hands
Nigel Aw & Kow Gah Chie, Malaysiakini
The Election Commission (EC), after 13 years and three election cycles, on Thursday announced the commencement of a nationwide redelineation exercise.
Within hours, the opposition rained a torrent of criticism against the EC, accusing the commission of trying to engineer the redelineation in BN’s favour.
Much of these criticisms were focused on Selangor, where the number of voters in the parliamentary seats were dramatically altered.
Malaysiakini looked at the patterns to see if there were any merits to claims that the EC was up to no good.
We first listed all parliamentary seats in Selangor based on the majorities won by BN or the federal opposition, in an ascending order.
This was then compared with how much the respective seats were enlarged, or shrunk, in terms of voters under the latest redelineation exercise.
From the simple analysis, it was found that parliamentary seats in Selangor that were won by the opposition by more than 60 percent of the votes cast, with the exception of Puchong, were all enlarged.
However, all marginal seats won by the opposition with a vote share of between 55 percent and 60 percent were shrunk.
As for high risk opposition seats that were won by less than 55 percent and BN seats, the size were largely unchanged.
