Malaysia: Malaysia’s Election Commission (EC) will re-delineate constituencies using GIS after the General Elections 2012, according to the EC Chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof. The Chairman was in conversation with a Malaysian Daily, The Star.
Yusof said that the constituencies’ demarcation is very sensitive. Hence, the EC has decided to hold off correcting these errors until after the next re-delineation exercise. Once the demarcation using GIS will start, it will take two years to complete and there is less than two years for the next General Elections. So, the EC decided to wait until after elections to do the re-delineation.
Recently, the EC and the conduct of elections in Malaysia came under scrutiny. Several voters complained that they have been transferred to another voting constituency. Yusof explained, “In the past, rivers or roads were used for demarcation of constituencies but when we introduced GIS, we discovered in terms of locality these voters are in the wrong place.”
Yusof opined, “Legally, nobody can change voters’ address. But sometimes, a voter might think he stays in a particular constituency but in actual case the area he lives in falls under another constituency. For example, a voter might live in Gombak or Selayang and pay his water bill there but he is a voter in Hulu Selangor. That’s wrong. We find there are a number of such cases and EC has the power to correct these errors. There are a lot of such incidents in Perak, Penang and Malacca.”
Source: The Star
