The Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo): Electoral Maps and Cartograms from 1954 to 2025

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access, comprehensive collection of electoral boundaries and maps from 1954 to 2025, enabling detailed spatial analysis of Malaysia's electoral geography.

Contribution

It provides the first complete, publicly-available, machine-readable dataset of Malaysian electoral boundaries and generates election maps and cartograms for enhanced geospatial analysis.

Findings

First complete dataset of Malaysian electoral boundaries

Automated generation of election maps and cartograms

Supports analysis of malapportionment and gerrymandering

Abstract

Electoral boundaries in Malaysia are not publicly available in machine-readable form. This prevents rigorous analysis of geography-centric issues such as malapportionment and gerrymandering, and constrains spatial perspectives on electoral outcomes. We present the second component of the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access collection of digital electoral boundaries covering all 19 approved delimitation exercises in Malaysia's history, from the first set of Malayan boundaries in 1954 until the 2019 Sabah delimitation. We also auto-generate election-time maps for all federal and state elections up to 2025, and include equal-area and electorate-weighted cartograms to support deeper geospatial analysis. This is the first complete, publicly-available, and machine-readable record of Malaysia's electoral boundaries, and fills a critical gap in the country's electoral data infrastructure.