Malaysia's First-past-the-post System: An Inaccurate Representation of the Population's Will

In Malaysia, the winner of any seat is decided on a simple first-past-the- post system. Losing parties cannot award preferences to other parties as is often the case in other countries (such as Australia). For example, let's say in Australia the Green party wins 5% of the vote in a particular constituency, and the Labour Party wins 20%. On the other hand, the Liberal Party wins 23% of the vote. The Green Party then has the option of awarding its 5% to the Labour Party, giving the Labour Party a victory over the Liberal Party.

In addition to this, the Australian system also allows individual voters to vote on a list of different parties according to their own individual preferences – from most preferred parties to least preferred parties. In other words, you do not just vote for a single party to win, but you rank the parties according to your favourites, and the final result of the election takes into account everyone's preferences.

It should also be added that there are no elections for the upper house, i.e. Senate, of the Malaysian parliament. Our Senators are appointed and the Senate is not composed of members of parties in proportion to the popular vote.

Thus, in our system, BN coalition parties never contest the same seat and opposition parties usually agree not to compete against each other for a given seat so as not to divide protest votes. If for instance, a PAS candidate and a PKR candidate were both to stand against a BN candidate in a given seat, there is the fear that the protest vote against the BN would be divided and the opposition parties would have mutually undermined their chances of winning.

As a result, most contests for seats are "two corner fights" because in "three corner fights" opposition candidates tend to knock each other out. For this reason, a voter in Alor Setar in the state of Kedah, for example, would have had to choose in 2004 between voting for either a PAS candidate and a BN candidate for federal parliament. There was no PKR or DAP option. The ramifications of this reach far.

Because seats are contested in two-corner fights, opposition parties must come to agreements regarding which party will contest which seats. However, political parties are perceived mostly to represent large ethnic groups. Indeed, in peninsular Malaysia, with the exception of the BN's Malaysian Indian Congress, the other main parties are largely associated with either the Chinese or Malay ethnic groups.

What this means for smaller ethnic groups or special interest parties is that their only hope for getting elected into Parliament is by playing into the hands of the most powerful political block, in this case the BN. Consequently, the subtleties of the Malaysian population's political aspirations are buried under the extremely crude first-past-the- post system in effect in Malaysia.