[Teeth53]

Party president Anwar Ibrahim not having the majority to become prime minister would not have arisen had Dr M kept his promises. He also denied Mahathir’s claim that the nonagenarian would still be prime minister if not for the ‘Anwar move’.

The move refers to the Pakatan Harapan leader being...😭

How do these affect those 18+ vote value?

Electoral roll has increased over 40pct. Has your vote value appreciated or depreciated?

We previously mentioned the Federal Constitution stipulated that no constituency should exceed the ±33.33 percent limit of the national average number of voters.

The number of voters has significantly increased following the implementation of the policy of lowering the voting age to 18 years old and the Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) system which came into effect on Dec 15 last year.

Based on the EC’s electoral roll as of February 2022, the total number of Malaysian voters has now reached 21,056,108 with an increase of 40.90 percent (6,115,484 voters), compared to the total number of voters in the 2018 general election.

As many as 26 parliamentary constituencies have gained more than 50,000 voters each. Most of these are located in Selangor and Johor.

How do these numbers affect the vote value of urbanites compared to others? Let’s check it out...

299,638 @voters in Bangi. Largest constituency
Igan in Sarawak is a constituency with the least number of voters in Malaysia - 28,194. This article will take Igan as the basis for comparison.

Meanwhile, the largest number is in Bangi, Selangor, which recorded a total of 299,638 voters.
Despite every voter in Igan and Bangi having a vote to choose their parliamentary representative in the general election, the vote value in both of the constituencies is actually not the same. In 2018, one vote in Igan equals 9.13 votes in Bangi. This was because Igan had 19,592 voters while Bangi had 178,790.

However, following the implementation of the Undi18 and AVR system, the number of voters in Bangi became 10.63 times of Igan and this caused the “depreciation” of vote value in Bangi.

Hote value appreciated or depreciated? What is your vote value compared to Igan?

What is appreciation/depreciation of vote value?
Electoral gerrymandering has been a long-existing issue in Malaysia, resulting in a huge disparity of voting powers in different constituencies. It goes against the principle of “one-person, one-vote” and equal representation in the democratic electoral system.

In the meantime, the National Census 2020 report data showed that Malaysia’s urbanisation rate had reached 75.1 percent while Selangor recorded the highest rate of urban population which was 95.8 percent. For federal territories like Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, the urban population had already reached 100 percent. Johor also had 77.4 percent of the population living in the city.

It is undeniable that the high opportunities for employment and development in cities have led to rural depopulation and a fast-growing urban population. However, when the number of constituencies did not adjust accordingly, the population in urban areas will definitely become several times larger than in suburban and rural areas.

Therefore, the implementation of the AVR system without adjusting the number of parliamentary seats would only worsen the situation of malapportionment.

According to the EC’s data, Malaysiakini found that there are 24 constituencies with more than 150,000 voters, all of which are urban constituencies located in the peninsula. Their value of votes is also the smallest compared to other constituencies, which is more than 4.5 times compared with Igan.

Among the 24 constituencies, 15 were located in Selangor, followed by Johor (4), Negeri Sembilan (2) and one each in Kedah, Malacca and Perak.

In terms of states, Selangor has the highest number of voters and the population is still growing rapidly. Before GE14, Selangor had 2,415,074 voters - 16.2 percent of the total voters in Malaysia.

As of February 2022, the percentage of Selangor voters has increased to 17.3 percent (3,643,381 people), followed by Johor (12.4 percent) and Perak (9.7 percent).

In other words, these three states already make up 39.4 percent of the nation’s electorate.