It has been a long while since I last blogged about anything political. But I guess, this post would not be any political than my typical rantings. Malaysia – recently has just completed it’s 13th General Election on 5th May 2013.
The result – I must say rather controversial. Would I protest to it? Would I do anything about it?
If one were to analyse the results – especially when it comes to the popular vote, it looks rather not fair that for Barisan Nasional – they lost the popular votes, but still managed to hold the simple majority for the parliament. How can this possible?
The terms that I see people use is GerryMandering. What’s this gerry mandering??? Head over to wiki here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering. In a nutshell GerryMandering is:
Let me take a stab at how this works. Let’s look at the population in the Selangor vs Sarawak.
Interesting facts … Selangor has 22 parliament seats, Sarawak has 31 seats, Selangor has 5.46M population, Sarawak has 2.47M population. Top 4 parliament seats in sarawak (Kuching, Sibu, Miri, Bintulu) has 1.4M population. Giving 1M people to decide 27 parliamentary seats. But area wise… selangor has 8.1km2, sarawak 125km2. I reckon electoral boundaries are done based on combination of area + population. Its a classic urban vs rural..
So – you think is it fair? I don’t know … But to me the most important is for us to be able continue the peace and harmony of living in Malaysia.