A research project on electoral integrity from May this year revealed that Malaysia ranked 142nd out of 158 assessed countries, one step above Zimbabwe.

According to the data, Malaysia fell under the "very low/failed" category, which is the lowest out of five categories.

"Nearly all other countries in this category have experienced deep social and political instability, like Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, or have single-party systems, like Vietnam, that preclude meaningful electoral competition.

"Neither of these is true for Malaysia, making it a clear outlier in the category," said political science researcher Kai Ostwald in a 2017 academic paper titled "Malaysia's Electoral Process: The Methods and Costs of Perpetuating Umno Rule".

The paper is part of a series called "Trends in Southeast Asia" and the data ranking he used is the Global Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI), which is released by the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP).

Zimbabwe, ranked 143rd on the PEI, recently saw a military coup which eventually ended in the resignation of Robert Mugabe, who had been the country's president for nearly four decades. 

Contrary to these countries with social and political instability, Ostwald said Malaysia has had a well-institutionalised state which provides relative social stability, a high level of human development and robust economic development.

"This developmental success brings Malaysia's poor electoral integrity into stark contrast and suggests that its deficiencies are the result of deliberate manipulations, rather than a by-product of developmental strife," he said. 

He compared key areas in the electoral process in Malaysia, its Southeast Asian neighbours as well as East Asian countries using data from the PEI. He excluded Brunei, East Timor and China.

The comparison showed that Malaysia's electoral process is highly manipulated across all the key areas.

Only Malaysia's "party registration" and "vote process" on polling day reached regional standards, he said.

"When the less developed countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam are excluded, however, the gap reappears even in these areas.

"Malaysia's 'electoral laws' and 'electoral boundaries' have among the lowest scores in the world," he said.

Competition bias in favour of BN

Despite the academic attention on polling day malpractices like ballot rigging and alteration of vote counts, Ostwald argued that pre-election manipulations often have a far greater impact as it creates bias in the playing field favouring the incumbent.

"This is strongly the case in Malaysia, where nearly every aspect of electoral competition is biased in favour of BN through institutions and procedures that fall short of neutrality," he said.

As Umno has been the incumbent government for almost six decades, he said it has penetrated nearly all of the state's appendages.

This renders the line between Umno and the state essentially indistinguishable in many areas, he said.

Institutions such as the Election Commission (EC) and the Registrar of Societies (ROS) have both shown pro-BN partiality in the past, he said.

For example, he said, the EC's proposal for delineation of electoral boundaries have to be submitted to the prime minister for amendment before it is approved by a simple majority parliamentary vote.

This enables partisan manipulation of district boundaries to influence electoral outcomes, through gerrymandering and malapportionment, he said.

He added that constitutional limits on malapportionment in Malaysia were relaxed in 1962 and removed entirely in 1973.

"Level of malapportionment (in Malaysia) are now among the highest in the world.

"In fact, the EIP ranks Malaysia's electoral boundaries as the most biased of the 155 countries assessed," Ostwald said.

The current levels of malapportionment greatly reduce the chance that BN can be defeated through the polls, he said.

"The 13th general election (GE13) illustrates this clearly, as malapportionment translated the BN's four percent popular vote deficit into a 20 percent advantage in parliamentary seats," he said.

In GE13, the opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat garnered 50.87 percent of the popular vote compared to BN's 47.38 percent.

However, BN still managed to secure 133 parliamentary seats to Pakatan Rakyat's 89 seats.