Hot on the tail of Umno vice-president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi's controversial commentary , another Umno leader has urged Pakatan Rakyat to stop "sodomising" the rakyat's minds over the legitimacy of BN's win.

NONE In a column in the Malay language broadsheet Utusan Malaysia , Umno information chief Ahmad Maslan ( left ) said the fact is that to win an election in Malaysia, one has to win the most number of seats, not popular votes.

"As such, the opposition, which often claims to be clever and qualified to rule, must understand the laws of this country and stop embarrassing themselves.

"Stop 'sodomising' their own minds. Have some shame and respect the rakyat," Ahmad said in a hardhitting column titled 'Don't sodomise the people's minds', which clearly alludes to PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim, who was accused and acquitted of sodomy, twice.

Ahmad, who is now deputy finance minister, said calls for the sizes of constituencies to be standardised would be unfair to rural constituents and elected representatives.

azlan "For example, if parliamentary constituencies in Sarawak are standardised to 60,000 voters each, then the number of seats allocated for Sarawak representatives in the Dewan Rakyat will be cut from 31 to 18. Sarawak had, for the 13th general election, a total of 1,083,972 voters.

"Imagine also a member of parliament (MP) having to take care of a constituency as large or larger than a peninsula state. It's unfair to the MP or the people, whatever the system you may want to adopt," Ahmad argued.

A chart embedded in the article also shows that the BN had trumped Pakatan in terms of popular votes in nine out of 10 states in the peninsula.

The other state is Perak, where BN trailed by more than 100,000 votes but was declared winner as it won more seats.

'Low silver nitrate in ink to save us from cancer'

Ahmad said that besides the popular vote issue, Pakatan was also seeding doubts in the minds of the people by questioning why the indelible ink rubbed off earlier than it should.

NONE This, he said, was due to the low level of silver nitrate used, which was determined as such to safeguard voters' health.

"The BN would like to stress our full support to the medical experts of the Ministry of Health and to the Election Commission who took on the expert advice to put the voters' health first and protect them from cancer and kidney ailments, which can be caused by high concentration of silver nitrate," he said.

He said the EC chose to use ink with only one percent silver nitrate content because of this, and this level was sufficient for 30 to 70 percent of the ink to remain on voters' fingers for 10 hours.

"Any higher... and the risk of cancer will increase," Ahmad said, noting that the fact that voters had their names crossed out on the physical and electronic roll at the same time also prevented individuals from voting more than once.

As such, he urged the people to push the opposition parties to accept the election results and to respect the democratic process.

"Enough politicking. The people want leaders who concentrate on development. Don't drag them into your political desires," he said.

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