The Election Commission’s (EC) announcement by its secretary, Abdul Ghani Salleh, that the EC is preparing administrative work for a nationwide delineation exercise, is most welcome.

The preparation involves gathering development information and updating on numbers of residents and voters in all constituencies and presumably re-drawing the constituencies! The EC has to adhere to the following procedures -

On this basis a draft report will be produced and EC proposals will be made for any changes in electoral delineation, to the prime minister and the speaker of the Dewan Rakyat.

The EC will prepare a review proposal report that will be displayed for one month in selected public places, after the EC can has gazetted the delineation notice. It will be appreciated if the EC can give us the date of the delineation notice? Then we can all plan better to cooperate with the EC.

The EC is also required to receive ‘protest representations’ from the state governments, local authorities and the public.

Most importantly for the ordinary voters like you and me, groups of 100 or more people and voters, can make protests or complaints against any EC delineation proposals that are perceived to be unfair and irregular by the rakyat.

This constitutional provision has not been used much by the rakyat in the past.

The EC has to hold a ‘local enquiry’ on the public protests and complaints.

This is a privilege we all can enjoy as citizens and voters. But are we ourselves preparing to take advantage of our electoral rights and privileges? Not really.

But we have often grumbled about gerrymandering and the mal-appropriation of votes.

In fact some constituencies don’t follow the proper logic in the principles of delineation. They are not related to basic criteria like physical feature formations, such as rivers, valleys and mountain ranges, etc. Thus some constituencies are like snakes on the electoral map of constituencies, weaving in and out of so-called ‘safe’ constituencies.

Some constituencies as we know have more than 10 times the number of voters compared to the small constituencies; like Putrajaya as compared to Kapar in Klang.

How can we justify this kind of inconsistencies and apparent irregularities?

Hence the independent and voluntary organisation called Delineation Action Research Team (Dart) has done very commendable research on these challenging issues.

Exchange of ideas and data

EC chairperson Aziz Yusof graciously met the Dart team that I led with Proham, some time ago, to discuss some of Dart’s professional research and proposals.

We are hoping to meet the EC chairperson again soon, to collaborate further in the exchange of ideas and data and public feedback on the delineation exercise

This is part of our public participation in the review of the delineation exercise, as part of our democratic responsibilities.

We want to work closely with the understaffed EC staff to help improve the delineation exercise and make the EC more worthy of stronger public acceptance and national and international credibility and even greater public support and praise, if that is possible.

It will thus be laudable indeed, that as part of our voter and citizens’ responsibilities, we form delineation monitoring committees (DMCs) in every constituency in our country.

The DMCs could help the EC undertake this massive delineation exercise more efficiently and effectively, for the common good of all Malaysians.

We will all then feel a stronger sense of belonging and build for ourselves a greater Malaysian peoples’ faith, in the delineation exercise and the whole election system.

RAMON NAVARATNAM is chairperson of Asli/Centre of Public Policy Studies.