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It's been more than a week since Malaysia's historic elections ended, and Malaysians are still feeling emotional about it. Some were relieved that the country went through its electoral processes peacefully, while some were angry with the results tabulated in the early hours of May 6. Some even questioned the way the Elections were carried out in the country.



We discovered on Facebook that many users had taken the trouble to tabulate the results of GE13 to learn for themselves, as well as share with others, about what happened on May 5. The terms blackout and phantom voters literally haunted the pages of social networks for days. But one term that was frequently brought up, was gerrymandering, a term used to describe an electoral practice of delineating electoral seats to favour certain parties.



How does it work? Well, we can illustrate it with a simple example. One of the largest electoral districts in the country has close to 150,000 registered voters while the smallest with only over 37,000. While both in the state of Selangor, it puzzles people why are numbers spread out more evenly. Critics often question the fairness of such delineations, which tend to keep pro-government seats small as possible to so it would be 'easier' for the coalition to multiply their number of seats, and in turn, win enough to form government.



We know this has been the arguments of many organisations, such as Bersih and the Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project or popularly known as Merap, groups like these are strongly calling for electoral reform in the country.



Opposition politicians had also blamed the ruling coalition Barisan Nasional for packing in pro-opposition seats with pro-BN supporters. Voters in Selangor had also increased by over 600,000 people since the 2008 polls, to which opposition politicians have not been able to verify, while the election commission reasoned that it was a natural rise as the number of new voters had increased.



Facebook users Jason Lim and James Chong did the hard work by meticulously analysing GE13's results and presented their findings on the social network in detailed spreadsheets. We knew it was hard work because we took over 8 hours ourselves to verify and double-check the data with official figures from the Election Commission (EC).





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