In the 13th general election, people had braved violence, fraud and other obstacles in order to express their will through the ballot box. Bersih 2.0's Pemantau report as well as the People’s Tribunal report had claimed the elections need a total revamp.

There is an urgent need to review Malaysia’s first-past-the-post system and initiate conversations on alternative electoral system that will deliver much fairer representation, transparency and inclusiveness. It will also mean having an electoral system that will not discriminate against any groups, parties, individuals, minorities or otherwise.

My previous articles have discussed the major flaws of the first-past-the post (FPTP) system that resulted in unevenness in the votes-seats proportionality. The past two general elections have clearly shown how winning votes was not the name of the game. A government can be formed based on winning the majority of the seats even if it has a much lower number of popular votes.

Globally, at least 90 countries have chosen proportional representation (PR) and they have argued that PR help to resolve the following issues, such as:

  • Having more accurate and fairer representation of parties in legislatures as smaller (e.g. minorities, women, smaller parties) to the largest parties are proportionally stand a chance to be represented,
  • Providing voters with more choices on the parties and candidates to represent them,
  • Providing significant increase in voters turnout, and votes are not wasted and are represented in proportions,
  • Reducing gerrymandering and making the creation of safe seats as less significant as PR attempts to strike a balance between seat-vote proportionality. This also means that political perspectives and policy options matters more and voters can vote for the candidate or party that best represent how they feel.
Simply put, this means that in the PR system when a political party wins 30 percent of the votes, it will get 30 percent of the seats. So, it is unlikely for any political party to get 50 percent of the seats with 10 percent of votes, which is possible in FPTP. There are many variations to the PR system and I will introduce the mixed member proportional system as this seems to provide a much fairer representation.

The German approach - Mixed Member Proportional (MMP)

The German mixed member proportional system is a hybrid system that combines the FPTP system with a party list proportional representation. New Zealand has used this system since 1996.

In this system, a voter has two votes. The first vote is for the candidate or the electorate. The FPTP system is used in the first vote and any candidate who has the most votes wins. The second vote is for the party or the party list and the voter elects the party that s/he wants to represent them in parliament.

The party list have multi-member constituencies, with candidates contesting not as individuals but as members of part lists, and seats are then allocated to party lists based on some proportionality formulas. For example, in Hong Kong, where a method called Hare Quota is applied, to win a seat in a five-seat constituency will require only one-fifth of the votes.

Under the MMP, the voters will have two votes, one for the FPTP parliamentarian and another for the party list.

Table 1 is with a parliament of 100 seats. In this case, Party C which wins least votes (25 percent) ends up winning most seats (40 percent), yielding a vote value of 160 percent. Meanwhile, the most popular party, B, wins only 30 percent of seats despite winning 40 percent of votes, yielding a vote value of 75 percent. This is perfectly possible under the FPTP even in the absence of deliberate malapportionment and gerrymandering.

MMP overcomes this problem by giving the voters two ballots, one for their constituency representative, just exactly the same in our FPTP elections, and another for their prefer party. In the latter, parties will present a list of candidates and the seats gained will be taken up by the candidates according to their orders.

Under this system, half of the Parliament will come from the FPTP constituencies and the other half from the party list. (For ease of illustration, just assume the Parliament double its size, with 100 FPTP members and 100 more party list members.) The percentage of party list ballots will determine the total seats a party will eventually get.

Now assuming the voters will vote in the exactly same party for the party list ballots as in their FPTP ballots. The shares of the party-list ballots will determine the shares of all seats in the Parliament, not just the shares of total party-list seats. (See Table 2)

So, in the 200-seat Parliament, Parties A, B and C will get 70 , 80 and 50 in total corresponding to their party-list seat shares. Since they win 30, 30 and 40 FPTP seats respectively, the 100 party-list seats will be allocated to off-set their disproportionality: 40 for A, 50 for B and 10 for C. Naturally, their vote values would all be 100 percent.

(It is important to note that both Germany and New Zealand put a threshold to deny tiny parties gaining representation. The idea is to prevent proliferation of parties and an overly fragmented Parliament. In Germany, a party needs to win at least 5percent of party-list ballots or three FPTP seats to qualify for allocation of seats. New Zealand puts only a 5 percent threshold.) 

Mixed Member Majoritarian (MMM)

There is another electoral system similar to MMP called the Mixed Member Majoritarian (MMM), which is adopted by many countries including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines. The system also gives its citizens two ballots but the FPTP and Party-List components of the parliamentary seats need not be equal, and often the FPTP seats make up the higher proportion. Most importantly, the party-list ballot only determines the parties’ shares of party-list seats, not that of the total.

To ease comparison between the twins of MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) and MMM (Mixed Member Majoritarian), we keep the total of FPTP seats and Party-list seats (100 each) and the parties’ shares of FPTP ballots and Party-list ballots (35 percent, 40 percent, 25 percent).

As the share of party list ballot decides only the share of party-list seats , and not just the share of all seats in Parliament, the parties A, B and C will get respectively 35 , 40 and 25 party-list seats, resulting in only more balanced but not fully proportional totals: 65 , 70 and 65 .

As we can see, the least popular Party C is still over-represented by 130 percent while the most popular Party B, is still under-represented, but the degree of disproportionality has decreased. Hence, the MMM is considered only a semi-proportional system and not a PR system because the disproportionality caused by the FPTP element is only partially mitigated.

The then-Election Commission chairperson, Abdul Rashid Abdul Rahman, had led a 12-member delegation to Germany to study its electoral system prior to the German federal elections from Sept 7-14, 2004. The team, which comprised representatives from MCA, Gerakan and MIC, was to visit Berlin and several other major cities in Germany. Since then, there has not been any public report on the team’s findings.

Subsequently, in the usual Malaysian style, the former Election Commission deputy chief Wan Ahmad Wan Omar dismissed proportional representation as a viable alternative in a public forum held on Aug 25, 2013.

Nonetheless, it should not snuff out any discussions on the potential of proportional representation as a viable alternative to first-past-the-post, and the possibility of its contribution to political representation in Malaysia.

MARIA CHIN ABDULLAH is the chairperson for the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections 2.0 ( Bersih 2.0 ) and the executive director of Empower . She believes politicians are bad masters if not made good servants through free, fair and competitive elections