Boundaries review committee formed…so now what?
September 12, 2019
The formation of the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee (EBRC) in August 2019 suggests that the 14th General Election (GE) will be held soon. In an editorial in Yahoo! News, Associate Professor Bertha Henson (NUS Department of Communications and New Media) presents the pre-elections landscape in Singapore, past and present, and the implications of the EBRC’s recent formation.
A/P Henson states that the 14th GE must be held by 15 April 2021 due to constitutional requirements. However, she believes a more obvious signal of when the 14th GE will actually be held is when the EBRC releases its report detailing the new electoral divisions; the past 3 GEs have been held around 2 months after the release of the report.
While committees that review electoral boundaries help account for demographic changes, A/P Henson also notes that changing boundaries is a common political tool to carve out areas which favour dominant political parties – also known as gerrymandering.
In Singapore, the EBRC determines the range of voters allocated to each MP, and thus the size of each constituency, with reference to the previous GE. The drawing of boundaries also factors in the Prime Minister’s (PM) preferences of the number of Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) and Single Member Constituencies (SMCs); in 2016, PM Lee Hsien Loong had promised to reduce the size of GRCs and increase the number of SMCs. The significance of the EBRC explains why the Workers’ Party had been eager to know when its formation would be. Opposition parties want to know as soon as possible whether they have been focusing their efforts in cultivating popular support in the right spaces.
Nevertheless, A/P Henson finds it odd that the formation of the EBRC came in the midst of bad news such as the poor economic growth projections for 2019. She cites an explanation as debated by other political watchers, whereby the Singapore government might be holding a “flight-to-safety” election where voters would vote for the status quo, in other words the People’s Action Party, in times of economic uncertainty.
Read the article here.