Gerrymandering the Democracy

Now it is clear.

That is how UMNO/BN can survive the federal government-ship for half a century -- through cheating!

Artwork Description:

English: How Gerrymandering can influence the result of elections in a non-proportional system. In each case there are 36 green and 28 magenta dots in total. Depending on how the 4 districts are designed, there can be a 3:1 or a 4:0 win for the greens, a 2:2 tie, or even a 1:3 win for the state-wide minority party (magenta)

"I would completely overhaul our electoral process to ensure free and fair elections, and adopt proportional representation to replace our existing first-past-the-post electoral system.

Parliamentary democracy in Malaysia has been continuously undermined through gerrymandering (manipulation of electoral composition) and malapportionment (manipulation of electoral size). A clear example of malapportionment is how in the March 2008 elections, Putrajaya, with a population of about 5,000, sent one MP to Parliament while my constituency, Seputeh, which has over 76,000 voters, also had only one seat in Parliament.

If you consider the March 2008 elections, Barisan Nasional (BN) obtained barely half of the popular vote — about 51% of the 7.9 million votes cast and yet they controlled 63% of the seats at stake in Parliament, i.e. 140 out of 222 seats. If you exclude the voters in Sabah and Sarawak, where BN won all but two seats, their popular vote dips to 49.8% in Peninsula Malaysia. (Source:http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=10778)

This kind of electoral manipulation is traitorous to the people's will."

"“The reason we lost Selangor in 1969 was because of the non-Malay votes. So we decided to take Kuala Lumpur out of Selangor and turn it into Federal Territory to reduce the non-Malay voters in the state. Then we created a new Malay city called Shah Alam so that we can flood Selangor will more Malays and dilute the remaining non-Malay voters in Selangor.”

That was what Fahmi explained -- the reason why Selangor was split into two with the creation of the Federal Territory and the reason why Shah Alam was created as the new State Capital cum Malay city.

“It worked for awhile as long as the Malays vote Umno and the non-Malays vote opposition. But when the Malays also vote opposition then this strategy no longer works. So we need to think of a new strategy.”

The ‘new’ strategy Umno is talking about is not actually new but is an ongoing strategy. This strategy is called gerrymandering and it was invented by the Americans."

Read more on the following articles:

TheNutGraph - MP Watch - Teresa Kok (Seputeh)

MalaysiaToday - Why the two-thirds is crucial

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