General elections were held in Malaysia on Saturday, 25 April 1964. It elected members of the expanded Dewan Rakyat, the lower house of the bicameralParliament of Malaysia, after the Malaysia Agreement of 1963 whereby the Federation of Malaya was superseded by Malaysia with the additions of the Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah. Voting took place in 104 out of 159 parliamentary constituencies, each electing one Member of Parliament (MP).[1]State elections also took place in 282 state constituencies in 11 out of 14 states of Malaysia on the same day, each electing one Member of the Legislative Assemblies (MLA).
The result was a victory for the Alliance Party, which won 89 of the 104 seats with a turnout of 80%. Two Alliance candidates were returned uncontested. Notably, the result also contributed towards the eventual expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. The Singaporean-based People's Action Party (PAP) had decided to run on the peninsular in response to the United Malays National Organisation (UNMO) participating in the 1963 Singaporean general election, which violated an agreement not to do so, and although the PAP attracted large crowds at its rallies, it won only one seat – Devan Nair in Bangsar at Selangor.[2] It is thought by some historians that Minister of Finance and Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) President Tan Siew Sin's appeal to the ethnic Chinese in the peninsular to avoid challenging the Malay special rights and risk merger with Indonesia helped the MCA retain its status as the "undisputed leader of the Chinese in the Malayan peninsula" at the time. Nevertheless, Alliance leaders, especially from UMNO and MCA, were furious with the PAP and would deem them and Lee Kuan Yew's charisma with voters as a threat to their rule.
As it was the first parliamentary general election held after the formation of Malaysia in 1963, state elections were not held in Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak. Transitional provisions allowed the state legislatures of the three states to choose their parliamentary representatives until the next election. The three states were allocated a total of 55 seats – 15 for Singapore, 16 for Sabah and 24 for Sarawak. Together, these three states held 35% out of the 159 seats in parliament. This was intended to act as a check and balance to prevent parliament from passing constitutional amendments – which required a two-thirds majority – without the agreement of representatives from the three new states. After Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak were only left with 28% of the seats (when 40 seats were divided by the remaining 144), and as a consequence both states were not able to stop parliament from approving laws that would erode on their special rights granted upon them as equal partners. The percentage would further fall to 25% after the 1974 general election, and despite an increase in seats over the years, the percentage has remained almost constant ever since.[3]
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