COMMENT The Election Commission’s (EC) move to proceed with its redelineation exercise in the “States of Malaya” by blatantly taking out Selangor where it faces an embarrassing suit is not only unconventional, but unconstitutional.

It is unconstitutional because the States of Malaya are always in one entity in constituency redelineation. Never in our constitutional history any of the states of Malaya was treated as equal to the states of Sabah, Sarawak and once, Singapore.

Before the formation of Malaysia, redelineation was designed to be a single process which would allocate federal constituencies to the state proportionally and then delimit each state proportionally into federal and state constituencies.

With Malaysia coming into existence, Article 113(6) was added to the Federal Constitution and it read,

There shall be separate reviews under Clause (2) for the States of Malaya, for each of the Borneo States and for the State of Singapore, and for the purposes of this Part the expression “unit of review” shall mean, for federal constituencies, the area under review and, for State constituencies, the State.

Today it reads,

There shall be separate reviews under Clause (2) for the States of Malaya and for each of the States of Sabah and Sarawak, and for the purposes of this Part the expression “unit of review” shall mean, for federal constituencies, the area under review and, for State constituencies, the State and the expression “States of Malaya” shall include the Federal Territories of Kuala Lumpur, Labuan and Putrajaya.

The creation of separate units of review corresponded with the disproportional allocation of federal seats between Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. This is related to the “approximately equal” apportionment demanded by sub-section 2(c) of the Thirteenth Schedule.

Today, such “approximately equal” apportionment applies on constituencies within the same state. Before the 1973 constitutional amendment, it was meant to apply on constituencies within the entire unit of review. For Sabah and Sarawak, “unit of review” and “state” are the same thing. For Malaya, “unit of review” means one single system while “state” means 11 systems...