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Malaysia’s First-Past-the-Post Electoral System 223

Gerrymandering can take place covertly before delimitation exercises, too,
even to constituencies which delimitation supposedly leaves untouched. As
the building blocks for parliamentary and state constituencies, polling districts
in Malaysia are not administrative units like boroughs or villages with xed
boundaries, but purely electoral subdivisions created to organise polling. e
EC can freely change their boundaries. Map 11.2 shows the expansion of
the parliamentary constituency of Sungai Siput in Perak between 2013 and
2018, despite its being unchanged in the EC’s delimitation review. While all
its polling districts remained on the same electoral roll as in 2013, Pos Piah, a
hilly polling district of Orang Asli (indigenous) settlements, had been moved
northward to cover an entirely di erent area, previously in Lenggong. Such
covert boundary changes escaped both public scrutiny and parliamentary
approval, giving the EC an even freer hand in gerrymandering.

Consequence of Malpractices: Seat-vote Disproportionality
Along with uneven distribution of partisan support, malapportionment and
gerrymandering of constituencies result in seat-vote disproportionality across
parties, such that a vote for a favoured party may be equivalent to a few votes
for a disfavoured party. Tables 11.8–11.10 show, respectively, the vote share,
seat share, and ratio between these for each major party in the 15 elections in
Malaya/Malaysia since 1955. In Table 11.10, a value of 1 indicates absolute
equality; the further above 1, the more underrepresented a party is; the further
below 1, the greater its overrepresention. Table 11.11 then compares the value
of a vote for the ruling coalition versus for the top three opposition parties,
measured by vote share. As malapportionment and gerrymandering only
became rampant after 1974, we may attribute disproportionality largely to
uneven distribution of partisan support for early elections through 1969 and
to malpractices since 1974.
Already obvious before 1974, the distortion of the electoral mandate
worsened post-1969 because of malapportionment and gerrymandering. Until
1969, one of the biggest victims was the Socialist Front, which needed 12.25
votes to o set a vote for the Alliance in 1964. Post-1969, PAS fared the worst
when it had to win 40 votes to match one for BN in 1986, followed by PKR
in 2004, when it took 26 votes to match one for BN. e absolutely worst-
o , though, were Parti Negara, the largest opposition party in 1955, as well as
Pekemas and PSRM, third largest in 1978–86, none of which got any seats.
is means no quantity of votes they won could match one vote won by the

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