Former Bersih treasurer Thomas Fann and three others have filed an application for judicial review at the Johor Baru High Court against the Election Commission over the redelineation exercise.

They are claiming that the exercise was flawed, unfair and violated the principles set out under Section 2 of the 13th Schedule of the Federal Constitution.

The application was filed online two days ago by lawyer Jimmy Puah from the law firm SK Song.

Fann is a voter in the Pulai parliamentary and Pengkalan Rinting state constituencies. The other applicants are Ng Siam Luang, Ang Yien Meei and Choo Mun Ying, all from the Gelang Patah parliamentary and Skudai state seats.

They named the EC, its chairperson Mohd Hashim Abdullah and secretary Abdul Ghani Salleh as the respondents in the application.

They filed the judicial challenge after their objections in the first display of the delimitation process were not taken into consideration when the second public display was made on March 8.

The applicants are seeking a declaration that the proposed recommendation for federal and state seats for Johor by the EC on March 8 is unconstitutional.

The four are also asking for a certiorari order to quash the proposed recommendation, a mandamus to compel the EC to publish new recommendations in line with the Federal Constitution, and a stay of all proceedings for the proposed recommendations.

They claimed that EC has violated the principles outlined under Section 2(c) of the 13th Schedule, which states that the number of voters within each constituency in a state ought to be approximately equal.

They noted that the Gelang Patah parliamentary seat is the largest with 119,175 voters, which is 3.17 times larger than the Labis constituency with 37,568 voters.

“How can 3.17 be 'approximately equal' to 1?,” they asked, adding that this was clearly a violation of Section 2(c) and it renders meaningless the “one person, one vote, one value” principle which is fundamental to the whole idea of elections and electoral representation in a democracy.

“The vote value of P162 Gelang Patah is less than a third that of a vote cast in P142 Labis,” the three from Gelang Patah who filed the application claimed.

Fann said Section 2(d) of the 13th Schedule of the constitution, stipulates that “regard ought to be had to the inconveniences of voters on alterations of constituencies, and to the maintenance of local ties".

“For representative democracy to be meaningful, for a group of people with common interests to be properly represented by a person elected from among themselves, boundaries must be drawn in such a way that 'local ties are maintained, not severed',” he said.

More than 178k voters with no address

Citing his Pulai and Pengkalan Rinting as example, Fann said they contain two local authorities, namely the Johor Baru City Council and the Johor Baru Tengah municipal council.

“This was unnecessary and it combined two communities with different local interests. It is totally illogical that a voter at the city centre in Johor Baru should share the same constituency and MP with a voter who lives in Nusa Bestari, some 20km away.

“Any local person could tell you that this is wrong. This is called gerrymandering,” he explained.

The four applicants also discovered that there are 178,887 voters in Johor whose addresses are not listed in the electoral roll.

“This account for 10.8 percent of Johor voters. How can this be? If EC does not have their addresses, how could EC determine in which constituency they should be placed in a delimitation exercise?

“Or who is to say that they are real voters and not phantom voters? This is totally shocking and unacceptable,” they added.

Furthermore, they claimed to have discovered that the EC had unconstitutionally and secretly altered the electoral boundaries even before the delimitation exercise through the administrative process of polling districts alteration, which they alleged to be a severe violation of Article 113 and the 13th Schedule of the constitution..

“It is clear to us that the EC is not the independent body it is supposed to be and it has become the servant of the ruling party and not the rakyat. It is our hope that the court will grant us leave so that our counsels can present the facts before our learned judges to rule upon,” they said.

Similar judicial challenges had been filed in Selangor and Malacca, where the judges had granted leave and a stay of the delimitation exercise.