COMMENT | Fixing the malapportionment mess

COMMENT | Yesterday, we assessed how malapportionment divides Malaysian society due to certain demographic backgrounds and particular patterns associated with constituencies with different electorate sizes. This article focuses on a step-by-step process to rectify issues with our unfairly drawn constituencies.

First step: Fixing polling district mess

The 13th Schedule of the Malaysian Constitution lays the guidelines on how constituencies are drawn. One of the key rules for drawing electoral boundaries is the constituencies have to be drawn with consideration of facilities that can assist with voter registration and polling machinery. With the implementation of Undi18, the process itself exposed a hidden problem in redelineation – insufficient polling centres.

Every voter is assigned to a polling district (the building block of constituencies) where the polling district is assigned to a polling centre.

While one can assume the said polling district would have an in-house polling centre, the reality is many polling districts are drawn with little consideration of polling centre availability. For example, around 13 percent of the electors of Penang have been asked to vote outside their home state constituency