Workers Revolution! – A Welcome to the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Sg. Siput!

March 11th, 2008 gier

In the recently concluded General Election, a new era, a new dawn, a tsunami, and a whole host of other cliches began in Malaysia. Oh yes! For Comrade Jeyakumar, Central Committee Member of Parti Sosialis Malaysia was elected as the beloved leader of Sg. Siput. In this joyous and momentous occasion, we at mentera.org would like to remind our comrades that the revolution is not yet over. Today, Sg. Siput is just a parliamentary seat but we must work together so that we can secede from the brutal and oppressive capitalist state of Malaysia and build the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of Sg. Siput!

Now that the capitalistic and oppressive Chairman of Maika Holdings have been removed from power, we urge Comrade Kumar to continue the struggle against oppression of the working class by the self-centred, oppressive, brutal and hubristic central government. We have every confidence in Comrade Kumar, to defend the rights of the estate workers, the downtrodden, the single mothers, the Orang Asli,the downtrodden, the working class and the entire constituency of Sg. Siput who have been neglected. And downtrodden.

For too long, the people of Sg. Siput have been at the mercy of the rapacious and greedy capitalist “rulers” and they have finally said No More! And they have chosen to embrace the revolutionary struggle, to become comrades in the fight against oppression, capitalism, cronyism, nepotism, oppression, racism, corruption and oppression!

The Working Class Movement moves apace for the working class!

Comrade Kumar and the People of Sg. Siput, we raise a clenched fist and salute you!

Long Live Socialism!

Workers of the World, Unite!

–

Endnote: I know I’m just trying to be funny, but if you have the time, check out PSM’s site. As the maintainer of the Other Malaysia website, I can say that it is no accident that PSM is the only political party that we link to.

Posted in Lame Jokes, Mentera Moden, Politics | 5 Comments »

The Single Winner Voting System: A MILF-PRON Primer for the Election

March 7th, 2008 gier

In the previous post, we discussed the First Part The Post system of voting in the criminals you detest the least. FPTP is a subset of an overall group of voting systems called the Single Winner Voting Systems. How the SWVS is implemented in Malaysia is our area of concern here, but you can read up on it on Wikipedia, of course.

The objective here is to point out that in spite of what the incumbent government says, support for them is not as overwhelming as we would generally think. While they have always had a 2/3rd majority in parliament, this is not often reflected on the ground in proportion. Let’s take the following example:

We use the state of Negri Sembilan, using data from the 2004 GE. There were 8 parliamentary seats contested in that GE (same as for the 2008 GE too), all of which were won by BN.

Constituency	No. of votes (BN)	No. of votes (the other dood)	Majority	% of votes to Winner
P126 – Jelebu	20,650	5,870	14,780	77.87
P127 – Jempol	26,360	9,280	17,080	73.96
P128 – Seremban	36,542	20,306	16,236	64.28
P129 – Kuala Pilah	22,105	8,763	13,342	71.61
P130 – Rasah	25,009	20,446	4,563	55.02
P131 – Rembau	28,664	10,008	18,656	74.12
P132 – Teluk Kemang	28,494	10,717	17,777	72.67
P133 – Tampin	23,936	5,852	18,084	80.35
TOTAL	211,760	91,242	120,518	69.89

So, as we can see from the table above, all 8 seats were won by BN, with almost 70% of Negri Sembilan voters shooing them into parliament. In a SWVS such as the one practised in Malaysia, the 30% odd Negri voters who wanted someone else to represent them do not get a look in at all. Critics of the SWVS says that to be really fair, the 30% should also be represented in parliament proportionally. So, in an ideal proportional voting system, there would be 5.6 BN MPs and 2.4 opposition MPs representing Negri Sembilan. So fun.

Of course, a whitewash like Negri Sembilan do not show the extent of what is considered the inequality inherent in SWVS. Let’s consider Kedah instead.

Constituency	No. of votes (BN)	No. of votes (the other dood)	Majority	% of votes to Winner
P4 – Langkawi	16,510	5,738	10,772	74.21
P5 – Jerlun	19,123	16,981	2,142	52.97
P6 – Kubang Pasu	26,657	12,945	13,712	67.31
P7 – Padang Terap	14,776	12,604	2,172	53.97
P8 – Pokok Sena	29,740	22,440	7,300	57.00
P9 – Alor Setar	28,379	13,864	14,515	67.18
P10 – Kuala Kedah	36,707	26,493	10,214	58.08
P11 – Pendang	24,380	24,430	50	49.95
P12 – Jerai	30,154	19,749	10,405	60.43
P13 – Sik	15,357	15,038	319	50.52
P14 – Merbok	29,607	14,162	15,445	67.64
P15 – Sungai Petani	36,067	18,565	17,502	66.02
P16 – Baling	32,661	28,432	4,229	53.46
P17 – Padang Serai	26,269	15,953	10,316	62.22
P18 – Kulim Bandar Baharu	22,556	14,558	7,998	60.77
TOTAL	388,943	261,952	127,091	59.76

So, for Kedah in 2004, out of 15 seats, 14 were won by BN with PAS obtaining a solitary seat. However, looking at the voting numbers, BN effectively represents 93.33% of Kedah in Parliament with just less than 60% of the voters actually voting for them.

Every GE, the boffins in the ruling party and the opposition would look through these numbers, figuring out vulnerabilities, “swing” votes, ekcetera. This is because, in spite of what the TV ads run by BN tells you, Malaysians are actually not that easy to please.

Anyway, am bored oredi. Thought of writing about gerrymandering too, but sod it. After elections lah …

Posted in MILF-PRON | No Comments »

First Past The Post: A MILF-PRON Primer for the Election

March 4th, 2008 gier

‘They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes,
yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts?
Only that things go on as normal
and tomorrow is pretty much like today.’
– Lord Vetinari (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

It goes without saying that as a simultaneously reactive and proactive institution, the Mentera Institute of … MILF-PRON … should lend its brain farts along with the braying masses in putting its 2 sen[1] opinions regarding the upcoming General Election. We thought that it is apropos [2] to provide a primer regarding our election system, which we learnt from that other august institution, Wikipedia.

In this primer, we will tackle the first of three concepts which are of rather high importance for voters’ understanding, which are: First Past the Post, Single Winner Voting System and Gerrymandering. Let’s begin.

First Past The Post

In a First Past The Post (FPTP) system, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins the election. Now, that is as it should be obviously. However, this system has a rather obvious flaw too. Take the following example. Let’s consider the Lembah Pantai parliamentary constituency (P121)[3]. There are 3 candidates vying to be elected to represent the natives of Lembah Pantai. These are, in order of hotness, Nurul Izzah Anwar, Shahrizat Abdul Jalil and N. Periasamy. Further, let’s say that in the election, the votes were tallied as so:

Candidate	No. of votes	% of votes
Shahrizat Abdul Jalil	23,227	41
Nurul Izzah Anwar	19,826	35
N. Periasamy	13,596	24

This would give Shahrizat the P121 seat, with a “majority” of 3,400 votes. However, we can see that in spite of the win, Shahrizat in actual fact only has the support of 41% of the voters in P121. Shahrizat, in other words, is the “First Past The Post”, without actually having a simple majority.

In can be speculated that if there was no “split” in the voters who didn’t want Shahrizat to represent them, and only one other candidate was contesting (Izzah, because she’s hot), then the other candidate (i.e. Izzah, because she’s hot) would have been able to garner 59% of the voters and win the seat.

And this is why the opposition fight with each other every time before the GE, to avoid split votes. And this is also why the incumbent government is sometimes laughing their arses of at the opposition … but that’s a story for another day.

So, that’s First Past The Post. Next, we will discuss the superset of FPTP, the Single Winner Voting System — a.k.a. how 64% of Malaysian voters can hand 90% of the Parliament to the last Election’s overall winner.

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[2] A Greek word meaning … I’m not sure what, but sounds very intellectual so it’s appropriate for this post.

[3] See http://www.undi.info/

Posted in MILF-PRON | 3 Comments »