Saturday, May 18, 2013

Malaysia's rigged electoral system...

A win for the opposition is nearly impossible

As the smoke clears after the Malaysian election battle it has become clear that under the current electoral system defeat of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) was never quite on the cards, even without the electoral roll and election day cheating and vote buying claimed by the opposition.

Indeed all other factors being equal it would probably take another 4 percent swing against the BN for the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) coalition to win the majority of seats.

As it was this was a remarkable victory for the PR which won 51.7 percent of the popular vote and 53 percent in under-represented peninsula Malaysia. Yet it took only 89 seats compared to the BN's 133 seats. Those numbers tell the tale of just how rigged the system has become.

 Each BN seat cost an average of 39,400 votes while each PR one cost 63,200. Those figures show the success of years of outrageous BN gerrymandering which has made nonsense of democratic, one-man one-vote principles. The extent of this has gone almost unnoticed by the foreign media - and foreign government reaction, treating the result as though it were the outcome of a relatively normal democratic process. Gerrymandering on Malaysia's epic scale is just as undemocratic as the ballot-counting frauds which President Ferdinand Marcos used to turn defeat into claimed victory during his years as president of the Philippines. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Malaysian opposition rallies amid claims of widespread electoral fraud...
  2. Malaysian elections expose worrying social schisms; "Chinese tsunami",
  3. Malaysia's Barisan ekes out diminished win, accused of vote fraud...
  4. Malaysia elections: Foreign workers assaulted by mob...
  5. Malaysia's long-ruling coalition wins elections as turnout hits record...
  6. Democracy crisis in Malaysia: foreign workers were employed for fraud voting...
  7. Malaysia elections: the dark forces of corruption...

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