The Rural-Urban Divide in Malaysia’s General Election(PoliTweet.Org)

108 out of 133 seats won by Barisan Nasional (BN) came from rural seats. 72 out of 89 seats won by Pakatan Rakyat (PR) came from urban and semi-urban seats.

While it is true that PR won every Chinese-majority seat, there are only 30 Chinese-majority seats in the country. That leaves at least 59 seats won with the support of other races.

When comparing Malay-majority seats, PR won more seats than BN in both semi-urban and urban categories. A Malay-majority seat cannot be seen as a guaranteed victory for BN.

In terms of the popular vote, BN obtained 57% of the popular vote in rural seats, 47% of the popular vote in semi-urban seats, and 36% of the popular vote in urban seats. Looking at the winning majorities of individual seats, the probability of BN regaining urban seats is low. This gap in the popular vote is illustrated in the infographics at the end of this post.

That is the picture of the political urban-rural divide. BN represents the rural majority and can retain power with rural and semi-urban seats alone. This election highlighted PR’s weak areas which are rural seats, Bumiputra Sabah majority and Bumiputra Sarawak majority seats.

Research methodology

For this research we defined 3 categories of urban development:

Rural = villages (kampungs) / small towns / farmland distributed within the seat. Rural seats tend to be physically large with a low population.

Semi-urban = larger towns and/or numerous small towns, may include villages as well

Urban = cities where a majority of the seat is covered by some form of urban development

This classification was done by us based on Google Maps satellite imagery and SPR maps. This is not the same as SPR’s own internal classification of seats. You can find our reference maps here (link). The methodology was:

1. Find the constituency on Google Maps (and Bing Maps, when the image wasn’t clear).
2. Identify the area covered by urban development, and the degree of development
3. Define the seat as rural, semi-urban or urban based on the guidelines above

This method was not ideal but it was practical given the lack of time and resources we have. A better method would be gridding (which you can read about here). We will re-examine the rural seats in the future and divide them into 2-3 categories.

We define an ethnic majority to be an ethnicity that is represented by more than 50% of the seat’s registered voters. A seat without an ethnic majority is defined as Mixed.

What follows is a summary of ethnic stats for each Parliament seat based on their category of urban development. The number of registered voters is shown in parentheses.

Total Seats

125 rural (5,756,489 voters)

• 78 Malay majority
• 16 Bumiputra Sabah majority
• 18 Bumiputra Sarawak majority
• 2 Chinese majority
• 11 Mixed

54 semi-urban (3,952,432 voters)

• 27 Malay majority
• 12 Chinese majority
• 3 Bumiputra Sabah majority
• 1 Bumiputra Sarawak majority
• 11 Mixed

43 urban (3,559,081 voters)

• 14 Malay majority
• 16 Chinese majority
• 13 Mixed

Seats won by BN

108 / 125 rural (4,598,255 voters)

• 66 Malay majority
• 15 Bumiputra Sabah majority
• 18 Bumiputra Sarawak majority
• 9 Mixed

20 / 54 semi-urban (1,303,937 voters)

• 12 Malay majority
• 3 Bumiputra Sabah majority
• 1 Bumiputra Sarawak majority
• 4 Mixed

5 / 43 urban (330,193 voters)

• 4 Malay majority
• 1 Mixed

Seats won by PR

17 / 125 rural (1,158,234 voters)

• 12 Malay majority
• 2 Chinese majority
• 1 Bumiputra Sabah majority
• 2 Mixed

34 / 54 semi-urban (2,648,495 voters)

• 15 Malay majority
• 12 Chinese majority
• 7 Mixed

38 / 43 urban (3,228,888 voters)

• 10 Malay majority
• 16 Chinese majority
• 12 Mixed

Infographics (click for full interactive version)

Seats vs Voters by Urban Development

Seat Comparison by Urban Development

Popular Vote Comparison by Urban Development

This shows the number of votes cast for candidates from each coalition, divided by seat category.

Seat Comparison by Ethnic Majority – Urban Development

This shows the number of seats categorised by the ethnic majority group and level of urban development. To see all the labels, please view the interactive version.

Malaysia’s election system drawn to sustain BN’s dominance,

By Syed Jaymal Zahiid May 23, 2013

The first-past-the-post system will always be advantageous to BN, a forum was told last night.PETALING JAYA, May 23 — Barisan Nasional’s (BN) rule will continue as long as Malaysia uses the first-past-the-post voting system despite redelineation, academic Amer Saifude told a forum here last night.

The Universiti Malaya Centre for Democracy and Elections (Umcedel) deputy director said the expected redelineation of constituencies by year-end would benefit Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s coalition and even better its Election 2013 performance.

“As long as we practice this first-past-the-post system, it will be advantageous to BN,” Amer told a forum on the 13th general election outcome.

“History has shown that every time there is a re-demarcation process, BN would perform better,” he added.

Despite winning only 47 per cent of the popular vote in the May 5 elections, Najib saw his coalition keeping the government with a simple majority, bagging 133 federal seats against Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) 89.

Amer pointed out that Najib was the first BN chief to score a weaker mandate in his maiden bid for power, a reflection of the faulty fundamentals of the first-past-the-post system.

The Umcedel deputy director said the system’s glaring defect could be seen in how BN, bar a few exceptions, had never won the popular vote by more than 60 per cent but yet managed to win a huge number of the seats it contested in.

He also highlighted how several constituencies nationwide had been gerrymandered without reasonable justifications.

“Sometimes you see the re-demarcation is illogical and unfair… the redelineation process is often made to serve the interest of certain parties,” he said.

The panel of speakers at last night’s forum. — Picture by Saw Siow FengAmer, however, noted that any move to redraw the constituencies must first have the consent of at least half of the members of the Dewan Rakyat.

PR federal lawmakers have signalled their intention to make full use of their increased parliamentary numbers to ensure constituencies are fairly redrawn when the Election Commission (EC) kicks off the redelineation exercise this year-end.

PKR’s Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli has said that if the exercise involves an increase in seat numbers, a two-thirds majority vote is needed to approve the changes before they are passed by the lower House.

The allegedly unfair dispersal of voters in constituencies has been used as a major argument point by PR lawmakers to back accusations that gerrymandering in favour of BN has helped the ruling pact stay in power.

In a recent article for news portal FZ.com, Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS) chief executive Wan Saiful Wan Jan had pointed out that the existing delineation of constituencies defies logic in terms of size and the number of voters.

The issue has also earned the attention of the foreign media, with the Wall Street Journal, in a comment written by its Hong Kong-based journalist Philip Bowring, pointed to how PR had lost the election despite winning 51 per cent of the popular vote ― an outcome that opposition lawmakers and civil society groups have blamed on gerrymandering.

Speaking to The Malaysian Insider, the DAP’s publicity secretary Tony Pua said with the polls now over and efforts under way to challenge some of the results through election petitions, the next step for PR would be to focus on the coming redelineation exercise as well as campaigning for a proportional representation system.

Segregation happens in national schools too — Lutfi Hakim

The air is toxic in our national schools. Not by design surely, but the schools do little to remove the spores of prejudice that the children bring into the schools from their homes. These absent outside influences spread quickly along the sweat-drenched hallways of ugly concrete and colour the minds of the pupils who spend the significant years of their lives trapped within those confines.

It would be unfair to solely lay the blame on the school teachers or its administrators. The teaching staff, overloaded with work as they are, are ill-equipped to stem the torrent of hate that pours every day through the school gates, replenished everyday in living rooms, mamaks and newspapers. That is, almost, the sole fixation of our race-aware minds — that is we may not feel racists ourselves, but we will find it very difficult to shift our way of thinking from a race-centric point of view. Few things in our lives seem to happen in absolute isolation of the “other”, our identity is constructed around what the other person is not. It is not “foreign influences” that are poisoning the minds of our young, it is ourselves, yet we point to schools and blame them for failing to stop our children from thinking the way we have taught them. 

What I will argue against here is this reheated paranoia against “vernacular” schools, and how they apparently segregate and pit the races against each other. If by vernacular we mean that a school discriminates to accept only a certain group of people, I could claim to have experienced time in a “vernacular” school because the school I went to only accepted Muslim students. I hear the opposition against my use of the term, but if the heart of the matter is the absence of students from diverse backgrounds than this particular school fits the bill. Now my experience there, whether you’d like to believe it or not, was markedly non-racial. 

We were Malay-Muslim, all of us, but nothing was ever said to us that taught us that we were better than people who were of different backgrounds. The Malaysian education syllabus may not have significantly addressed the issue of race relations but our dinniyah curriculum certainly did. There no two ways about it, we were taught, the circumstances of your birth does not make you superior to other; it was the contents of your heart and your actions that mattered to God. Or Allah, if that sits better with you.

Imagine my surprise when I left the musty confines of my small segregated utopia for the harsh sunlight of a Subang Jaya SMK after my PMR. Everything that I and my friends were allowed to ignore in our urban madrasah came crashing back upon us and suddenly we were again first identified as Melayu, before our names, before our selves. Beyond a small cabal of English-speaking kids from privileged backgrounds (who also happened to be the only group excelling at anything in school), my Sekolah Kebangsaan was strictly carved along linguistic lines: Malay, Cantonese, Tamil. 

Looking back I don’t think there was any malice in us arranging ourselves in that way; I don’t think anyone of my Melayus really hated the Chinese kids in a real way, it was more an extension of the norms we practised with our families in our neighbourhoods. Then as now, people tended to congregate around areas that they know to be Malay areas or Chinese areas or Indian areas. In this regard, schools and their diverse makeup of races would be the anomaly to the students rather than the opposite.

The problem is not schools, vernacular or otherwise. I do not claim that my experience in a SAR is representative of other types of segregating schools although I have many friends who went to similar schools who can share similar experiences. Likewise, I certainly don’t think that my SMK nightmare is true for everyone despite the fact that I frequently hear products of our national education system harbour deep suspicion against every person who looks different from themselves. 

The problem, in the view of my humble confused self, is that our society keeps perpetuating rancid beliefs that reduce others, and ourselves, into less-than-human beings not worthy of real empathy or respect. The fact that schools have not been equipped to deal with this significantly only compounds the problem further, but even if they did, their efforts would only amount to a small prod against this boulder barrelling down upon us from up the hill.

So it’s up to us really, not the schools, or some National Unity Department and their Filem Negara PSAs. Shall we bicker and spit at each other over the same things over and over again and suffer the consequences, or are we going to band together to throw away our old beliefs and work collectively towards creating a real national identity?

MALAYSIA BOLEH!!! THIS EXPLAINS HOW WE HAVE STUDENTS WITH 20 As.

The objective of SPM is to pass people?

How do you explain the fact that 87% of the students passed the exams of the Sijil Peperiksaan Malaysia (SPM)

Are students getting smarter? Or are SPM questions getting easier?

Let me put things in their proper perspective. 

During your grandfather's time, they would ask exam questions like:
"In what year did Parameswara find the kingdom of Melaka?"
The correct answer was "1402", and they found that only 10% of the students managed to answer the question correctly.. This didn't go down too well with the authorities, because the objective of the exams was to pass people.

I mean, what's the point of having exams if people fail?

So later, they found another way to ask the same question:

"Parameswara founded the kingdom of Melaka in the year:

(a) 2001
(b) 2004
(c) 1986
(d) 1975
(e) 1402

Tick the correct answer."

The results were better in that 20% of the students passed. But it was still not good enough, so the authorities tried a different tactic a few years later.

"Parameswara founded the kingdom of Melaka in the year 1402. True or false?"
Well, half of the students guessed "True" and the other half guessed "False".

Fully 50% passed. 

The results were getting pretty acceptable by now but still not good enough. Most other countries would be satisfied with a 50% passing rate, but not us.

We are a better country, because we are a boleh country. The authorities then cracked their heads and then came out with this one:

Read the following sentence carefully.

"Parameswara, the cousin of Proton-Iswara, founded the kingdom of Melaka in the year 1402. Underline the name of the person who founded Melaka."

60% underlined "Parameswara", 30% underlined "Proton-Iswara" and 10% underlined "1402".

Yeah!!!!....60% managed to pass! So krever!

But for some reason, the authorities were still not contented. So last year, they came out with this gem:

"One day in the year 1402, Parameswara founded the kingdom of Melaka.
Then he went home to have dinner. What did he eat?"

13% (smart students) handed in blank answers, 57% wrote "Maggi Mee", 10% wrote "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and 20% wrote "Nasi Lemak".

The correct answer was anything concerning "Food" of course!

After the marking was over, it was found that 87% of the students had passed.

87%!!!!!............now that's pretty impressive!

So it's true. So now the authorities are very happy that the students are indeed getting smarter. Well done!

Perhaps, this is why we have a host of students with an impressive string of 'As' who can hardly construct a decent sentence!

Never mind, our super-duper gomen can find a job for us one.

Duh……

BN Indians vs PR Indians(Sharmalan Thevar)

It has been a week since elections (GE13) ended. It is probably the most controversial elections in our nation's history. When I started this blog, I told myself to avoid writing about politics. But I can't help it. I decided to start writing whatever that I feel as necessary.


Alot of Barisan Nasional (BN) supporters particularly those from Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) believe that Malaysians of Indian origin can only be represented by BN at both state and federal level. They have played the race cards for too long.

I decided to do some calculation to check on this matter. 

During the elections, we will select candidates for 2 different seats. One is for the state level, the other is for the federal level.

The state seats are known as Dewan Undangan Negeri (DUN) in Malaysia. A person who wins a DUN is known as Ahli Dewan Undangan Negeri (ADUN). Federal seats are referred to as Parliament seats. A person who wins the Parliament seat is referred to as Member of Parliament (MP).

Let's take a look at the statistics if what BN-MIC says is true.

Indian reps in federal and state level after GE13.

Barisan Nasional fielded a total of 33 candidates of Indian origin. Of these 33 candidates, 4 won the parliament seats and 5 won the state seats. The majority lost in the elections.

Pakatan Rakyat (PR) fielded a total of 42 candidates of Indian origin. Of these 42 candidates, 10 won the parliament seats and 19 won the state seats. The majority won in the elections.

79% of Indian ADUNs are from Pakatan Rakyat. Only 21% of Indian ADUNs are from Barisan Nasional.
71% of Indian MPs are from Pakatan Rakyat. Only 29% of Indian MPs are from Barisan Nasional.

We need to keep in mind that MIC is an all Indian party. Yet, they did not win as many seats as the Indians of PR who are mainly from the multiracial parties of Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

Take a look below for the list of candidates, their constituencies and total votes. The winners have been highlighted. You can also compare the difference of votes gained. Click to download it.

Indian candidate performance for parliament.

The picture above is for the parliament seats. 

Both BN and PR fielded 13 Indians each for parliament seats. 7 of them met head to head. PR won 5 out of the 7 meets. The remaining candidates competed with candidates from other ethnics. 


Of those 6 non-Indian meets, BN only won 2 but PR won 5. These shows that at the parliament level, the Malaysian voters preferred PR candidates more than the BN candidates.

BN gained a total of 321,528 votes and PR gained a total of 538,568 votes. On average, a BN candidate gets 24,733 votes but a PR candidate gets 41,428 votes. 

Here are the details for the state level.

Indian candidates performance for state

BN fielded 20 Indian candidates and PR fielded 29 Indian candidates. 

13 of them met head to head. PR won 10 out of the 13 meets. The remaining candidates competed with candidates from other ethnics. 


Of those 7 non-Indian meets, BN won only 2. 
Of those 16 non-Indian meets, PR won 9. 

BN gained a total of 181,065 votes and PR gained a total of 333.877 votes. On average, a BN candidate gets 9,053 votes but a PR candidate gets 11,513 votes.   

Once again, the Malaysian voters have shown that the majority of them preferred Indians candidates from PR, and not Indian candidates from BN.

This clearly shows that the major representation of the ethnic Indian community actually comes from Pakatan Rakyat and not Barisan Nasional. 

NO TRICKS, PLEASE! EC may have problems re-delineating new seats in PR states

The Election Commission (EC) may find itself faced with obstacles when it gets to the task of re-delineating the electoral constituencies.

This will especially be so in Penang, Kelantan and Selangor where Pakatan Rakyat (PR) not only controls but holds two-thirds majority after the recent general election.

Under Article 113 of the Federal Constitution, the EC has to review the division of federal and state constituencies, and recommend changes as necessary every eight to 10 years.

The last re-delineation exercise was conducted in 2003, making this year the deadline for a review of the 222 parliamentary and 505 state constituencies.

The re-delineation process requires either a simple majority in the respective legislative assemblies to approve the recommendations (if there is to be no change to the number of seats) or a two-thirds majority if there is to be an increase in the number of seats.

If the states do not consent, the constituencies will remain unchanged.

Barisan Nasional has two-thirds majority only in Perlis, Malacca, Johor, Sabah and Sarawak.

In Penang, Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng told a press conference yesterday said any redelineation exercise which does not uphold the "one-person-one-vote" principle is a no-go for the PR government.

He said the upcoming redelineation exercise must emphasise this value, and PR will not agree to any new delineation of constituencies at the parliamentary or state level if the precept is not upheld.

The disparity between votes and seats won has led critics to allege gerrymandering, the practice of creating partisan-advantaged constituencies, as the cause for the inequality.

Several quarters have called for a more equal representation in the constituencies, and for equal weightage in votes between rural and urban seats.

The Malaysian Bar has also called on the EC to give effect to "as equal as possible" a representation in each seat, whether parliament or state.

Bar Council president Christopher Leong said the process must be underpinned by principles of equality.

"A delineation exercise must be conducted with the objective to achieve equality, and equal representation as far as possible.

"It must not be lopsided, where an MP of one constituency represents 100,000 people while another speaks for only 15,000 people," he said.

Some parliamentary constituencies, like Kapar in Selangor and Gelang Patah in Johor, have over 100,000 voters while the smallest seat is Putrajaya with 15,000 voters.

Leong added that while urban constituencies will have more people due to economic opportunities, this does not mean depriving urbanites of a fair voice in the legislative assemblies.

DAP unveils 14-point plan for Indians

The DAP has unveiled a 14-point plan, billed the 'Gelang Patah Declaration', that is aimed at alleviating the socio-economic status of Indian Malaysians, a demographic whose vote is considered critical to the ruling BN's desire to retain power in the face of a determined attempt by the opposition Pakatan Rakyat to eject them.

The plan was announced in Johor Bahru yesterday on the heels of an often acrimonious debate between the more assertive activists of the minority community and opposition parties accused of slighting the dire needs of the Indian poor by subsuming them under the rubric of a general alleviation of the Malaysian poor.

The DAP's 14-point plan is integral to the Pakatan plan to ease the Indian plight, such as resolution of the problem of stateless within 100 days of a Pakatan takeover, but in some aspects it accentuates some features while adding newfangled ones for good measure:

1. To resolve the problem of the stateless Indians within 100 days of a Pakatan administration;

2. To establish a National Housing Board which will build decent and affordable housing for marginalised groups, especially for displaced Indian plantation workers;

3. To ensure that all national-type Tamil schools become fully-funded and the infrastructure of every single school is up to par with 'sekolah kebangsaan' (national schools);

4. To invest in technical and vocational training coupled with apprenticeship programmes to provide an alternative education and career path for school dropouts from low-income Indian families;

5. To provide jobs and raise the wages of low-income Indians by implementing a-RM1,100 minimum wage scheme;

6. To increase the number of Indians in GLCs (government-linked companies), local councils, and public services;

7. To alienate land for existing Hindu temples and burial grounds and find replacement land for temples and burial grounds which have to be relocated;

8. To provide microcredit and other financial assistance schemes to Indian small businesses, with a special focus on women, youths and home-based business;

9. To put in place the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) and to eliminate deaths in police custody and custodial deaths;

10. To establish a special fund to promote Indian equity ownership in the country;

11. To establish a commission to address urban poverty and social problems faced by the Indian community;

12. To establish policies that could economically enable single mothers, including house ownership scheme;

13. To establish or enroll in existing residential schools outstanding Indian students from plantation and urban poor families;

14. To abolish all anti-rakyat legislation and to get rid of discrimination.

Permanent solutions

The 14-point plan was announced to a DAP gathering at a hotel in Gelang Patah that was attended by party adviser Lim Kit Siang and senior Indian leaders led by M Kulasegaran, the Ipoh Barat MP.

Others who attended were DAP MPs Charles Santiago, M Manogaran and state assemblyperson S Sivanesan.

Kulasegaran said the 14-point plan represents the commitment of the opposition to find a permanent solution to the problems faced by the Indian community.

"What the BN has done in the last four years under Prime Minister Najib Razak was to woo Indian voters with action that is ad hoc and not aimed at the deeper ailments of the community," asserted the DAP national vice-chairperson.

"Indian problems need fixes that are deeper and permanent than band-aids," remarked Kulasegaran.

"Our 14-point plan, if implemented, would root out Indian poverty root and branch," he opined.