The Electoral Reforms Committee (ERC) final report - which contains 49 proposals - appears to be stuck in committee, two years after it was completed.
The proposals include an overhaul of the country's election system, as well as making the Election Commission (EC) an independent body.
The report was completed in 2020, and a full report was handed over to then-prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin in August.
In December that year, then minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Parliament and Law) Takiyuddin Hassan said that the government had set up a new special cabinet committee headed by International Trade and Industry Minister Azmin Ali - to review the proposals.
Fast forward to today, and the matter is still in committee.
In a Parliamentary written reply yesterday, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Parliament and Law) Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said that the special cabinet committee "will review" the proposals.
He said the proposals touch on the authority of various ministries and also require legal amendments including to the Federal Constitution.
He was replying to a query from Lim Kit Siang (Pakatan Harapan-Iskandar Puteri) on whether the government was ready to table and debate the ERC report in the Dewan Rakyat.
One of the ERC’s key proposals was to replace the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system with a "proportional representation" (PR) system.
Under FPTP, the party that gets the most votes win, even if it is less than 50 percent of votes in a multi-cornered contest.
The FPTP system is why BN - which received 43 percent and 38.4 percent of the popular vote in the Johor and Malacca state polls - was able to win more than 70 percent of seats.
By comparison, the ERC said the PR system would be fairer and divide seats based on how many voters a party receives. - Mkini
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