Election Commission chairperson Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, who has about 30 years of experience in organising elections under his belt - tells malaysiakini why his commission is impotent in bringing reforms to the system in this first of a three-part series.

Malaysiakini: This coming general election will be your first as EC chairperson. Will there be any changes?

Abdul Rashid :

I found a lot of people misunderstood EC. We do try to create changes. We have adopted - from the British - a simple (voting) system because 65 percent of Malaysians (then) were illiterate.

The British thought, 'we'd give you a simple system' - which means that people go to the booth, vote for the candidate they want, and the winner will be determined on the basis who past the post first, even with one vote. So, there were candidates (in the past) who had won by one vote, seven votes...

This (first-past-the-post) system - if you talk about electoral democracy - is not a fair system because it does not allow the smaller parties the chance to win. This is because the smaller parties have no resources, no money, no manpower.