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Singapore’s electoral boundaries committee formed, kicking off countdown to GE2025
In the past four elections, the time between the committee’s formation and Polling Day has ranged from four to 11 months.PHOTO: ST FILE
Goh Yan Han
UPDATED JAN 22, 2025, 01:26 PM
SINGAPORE – The committee that determines Singapore’s electoral boundaries has been formed, kicking off the process for Prime Minister Lawrence Wong to call the next general election.
In the past four elections, the time between the committee’s formation and Polling Day has ranged from four to 11 months.
This means that voters could go to the polls in May, or even earlier if the committee is able to complete its work in time.
The ad-hoc Electoral Boundaries Review Committee (EBRC) is appointed by the prime minister, to whom it will submit a report.
The Elections Department (ELD) said in a statement on Jan 22 that PM Wong has convened the committee.
The report that the EBRC produces will trigger the redrawing of Singapore’s electoral constituencies – a necessary step before a general election can happen. The next general election must be held by November 2025.
ELD said that in reviewing the boundaries, the committee has been directed to “seek to keep the average size of GRCs, the proportion of MPs elected from SMCs, and the average ratio of electors to elected MPs, all at about the same as that in the last general election”.
There is no fixed timeline given to the committee to issue its report, but past teams have taken between three weeks and seven months.
Its formation has been hotly anticipated as a bellwether for when the next general election will be held. In 2024, opposition MPs filed parliamentary questions on several occasions to ask if the committee had been formed.
When asked in November 2024 when the EBRC would be formed, PM Wong said: “When we do so, we will announce it as we always do. We won’t do these things quietly.”
He also said then that he had not decided when the election would be held.
The EBRC will comprise five senior civil servants – Singapore Land Authority chief executive Colin Low, Housing Board chief executive Tan Meng Dui, chief statistician Koh Eng Chuan and ELD head Lim Zhi Yang, with secretary to the Prime Minister Tan Kee Yong as its chairman.
Its job is to review the boundaries of existing constituencies and recommend how many group representation constituencies (GRCs) and single member constituencies (SMCs) there should be.
Boundary changes typically take into account changing voter numbers in current electoral divisions due to population shifts and housing developments.
The report the EBRC produces goes to Parliament, which decides whether to accept the new boundaries.
Emerging new towns like Tengah in the west of Singapore and Bidadari in the Potong Pasir area have raised speculation that there will be changes to the constituencies they are in or near to, because of the rise in population they have brought to those areas.
The EBRC was last convened in August 2019, ahead of the 2020 General Election. It was tasked to reduce the average size of GRCs and create more SMCs.
It completed its report in March 2020, three months ahead of the general election, which was called in June. There were no six-member GRCs for the first time since 1991, as Ang Mo Kio and Pasir Ris-Punggol had their number of MPs reduced to five each.
Speculation has swirled around the prospective date of the next general election since PM Wong formally took over as head of the Government in May.
In December, he took over as the secretary-general of the People’s Action Party and said he would lead the ruling party into the polls.
Political parties have ramped up their activities on the ground, introducing new faces and conducting walkabouts.
Some 50,000 public servants have also been appointed as election officials, and training began in April 2024, ELD had said in March 2024.
- Goh Yan Han is political correspondent at The Straits Times.
