One of my earlier posts indicated that BN won 140 seats out of the 222 parliament seats up for grabs in the GE 12 which is 63% of the seats up for grabs. However, if we look closely at the total votes cast and the % won by BN, it is much closer than we expected.
From the 7.9 million votes, BN won merely 51.4% of the popular votes. this means about 12% difference between the popular vote and number of seats won. This is achieved through decades of delineation exercises to make constituencies very disproportionate where the smallest constituency in Malaysia (Putrajaya - approximately 6000 voters) to the largest (Kapar - more than 100 thousand voters) which is almost 20 times smaller.
This gives BN a very big advantage as some analyst actually stated that if BN won all the smallest seats to get a simple majority, they will only need less than 20% of the popular votes in this country.
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| source: http://malaysiafactbook.com/Gerrymandering_in_Malaysia |
What is gerrymandering?
According to wikipedia:
"In the process of setting electoral districts, gerrymandering
is a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a
particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries to create
partisan advantaged districts."
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