As GE draws near the ruling party is going to have to fend off more attacks on its integrity. The latest being the same story that pops up every five years – how the boundaries of constituencies are being drawn.
This isn't a uniquely Singaporean topic, as political parties around the world have been known to influence redistricting in their favour, by making sure people who are more likely to be their supporters are grouped together, giving them a higher chance of victory.
But does it really apply to Singapore?
It's understandably beneficial in a country like US, where you can draw up boundaries which either concentrate or dilute the vote of particular groups - African-Americans, Hispanics, Whites, rural, urban, religious, non-religious - giving the candidates running a bigger or smaller chance of victory.
But Singapore is just one city - how much can moving boundaries by a few blocks really change?
On top of that, local housing policy, which emphasizes blending all of its constituent ethnic groups together, has prevented social fragmentation. You don't have ghettos of any sort here, and people are quite uniformly distributed across the island.
Ironically, the only significant case of where ethnic identity influenced the outcome of an election was in Hougang, which has a fairly concentrated Teochew community, giving an opportunity for Low Thia Khiang to rise to take a parliamentary seat.
But that's an exception rather than a rule. And, as we can observe, PAP didn't dilute the Teochew vote, keeping LTK in the parliament for 30 years, what eventually paved the way for him to take Aljunied too, helming the GRC there in 2011.
Now, some people are questioning why boundaries need to change at all and why voters closer to the borders find themselves in different constituencies every few years.
Unfortunately, as attractive as freezing them sounds, Singapore continues to change quite dynamically. As populations in certain areas go up or down, redrawing the map is necessary to maintain some balance.
Similarly, reducing the threshold for the changes, meaning that constituencies would be forced to be of a similar size with just a small margin of difference, would only trigger more, not fewer, mergers or divisions for them to stay within the limits.
So, it's really not as simple as it seems.
And, by the way, I don't really care what the government says about the independence of Electoral Boundaries Review Committee.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, it's very difficult for anybody from the outside to verify that and, conversely, it's always an easy target for the opposition to try and suggest its decisions are influenced by the interest of the ruling party.
Besides that, all people have political sympathies anyway. Can any law guarantee that any EBRC member is not going to be influenced by his individual views?
That's why it's a really bad idea to listen to politicians from either side. Each group has its interest in saying what it does.
It's far better to simply look at the facts and outcomes.
Can the alleged gerrymandering really play a major role in Singapore? And if that's so, why hasn't the big bad government chopped up the areas where opposition is the strongest, allowing WP to eventually creep into neighbouring GRCs as well?
In fact, the GRC system itself – often attacked as another tool PAP is using to secure victories – has actually created conditions for the opposition parties to sweep multiple seats in one strike. That would be unlikely otherwise, as they don't have nearly as many decent candidates to contest SMCs on equal terms.
Sengkang GRC was created in part out of constituencies that Pritam Singh complained about. But another reason was population growth in Sengkang West, which could no longer be contained under an SMC.
So, it was EBRC's duty to redraw the borders and it turned out it helped the Workers' Party more than even it had anticipated.
It seems to me that it's just another convenient excuse for the opposition parties to attack the government, since boundaries have to be reviewed ahead of each GE anyway.
It's highly beneficial for them to question how it happens, even with no evidence of wrongdoing, portraying themselves as victims of the system controlled by the terrible PAP.
