COMMENT | In conjunction with the DAP conference and PKR congress, I have written to both Penang Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow and Selangor Menteri Besar Amirudin Shari, calling them to introduce “democratically appointed non-constituency seats” (Dancs) as an institutional remedy to Malay anxieties.

Dancs is similar to the closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) seats, and adding Dancs to the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) seats creates a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system as in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and Nepal.

Voters in these countries are given two ballots, allowing them to vote for different parties under the FPTP and CLPR systems.

In the proposed Dancs, voters can only vote for FPTP, but their votes would then be aggregated to allocate Dancs, limiting their options.

This is because Article 117 of the Federal Constitution stipulates that every constituency can only elect one assemblyperson and hence prohibits CLPR/Dancs which requires multiple seats in one constituency.

The whole idea of Dancs is exactly for Malaysians to see how...