EC address update plan may worsen urban overcrowding, says Bersih

Bersih chairman Faisal Abdul Aziz says the move may further worsen the imbalance of voters between urban and rural areas.

Bersih chairman Faisal Abdul Aziz said the move could further worsen the imbalance of voters between urban and rural areas.

Therefore, he cautioned that any proposal to alter the EC’s powers must be studied thoroughly before being implemented.

“Urban constituencies, which are already extremely dense, will become even more crowded if this is carried out. This is because many voters now live in urban areas due to work and other factors.

“We are already facing uneven voter distribution between urban and rural constituencies,” he told FMT.

He cited the example of the Bangi parliamentary constituency with its 300,000 registered voters compared to Sabak Bernam in Selangor with 50,000, and Igan in Sarawak with 30,000.

Last month, the EC proposed a structural reform that would give it the authority to update voters’ polling addresses to match the addresses listed on their MyKad, as part of efforts to strengthen a residence-based voting system.

Faisal warned that the move would have the opposite effect, ultimately eroding the voting power of urban residents.

“If this uneven distribution of voters is not addressed, the integrity of our elections will deteriorate further,” he said, citing statistics from the 2022 Electoral Integrity Project, which gave Malaysia a very low score of 30.95 for its electoral boundaries category.

Faisal said any redelineation exercise based on the principle of “one person, one vote, one value” should be completed first before the expansion of EC’s powers.

Former EC chairman Abdul Rashid Rahman backed the proposal to empower the commission to update voters’ polling addresses based on their MyKad details, but said that the move would be pointless unless the root of the problem – inaccurate addresses – is fixed first.

He said the government must enforce existing laws that require MyKad holders to update their residential addresses, to help the EC produce a cleaner, more accurate and relevant electoral roll.