Empirical research and public knowledge on Malaysia's elections have long been constrained by a lack of high-quality open data, particularly in the absence of a Freedom of Information framework. This paper introduces the Malaysian Election Corpus (MECo), an open-access panel database covering all federal and state general elections since 1955, as well as by-elections since 2008. MECo includes candidate- and constituency-level data for 9,704 electoral contests across seven decades, standardised with unique identifiers for candidates, parties, and coalitions. The database also provides summary statistics for each contest (electorate size, voter turnout, majority size, rejected ballots, unreturned ballots), key demographic data for candidates (age, gender, ethnicity), and lineage data for political parties. MECo is the most well-curated open database on Malaysian elections to date, and will unlock new opportunities for research, data journalism, and civic engagement.

翻译：长期以来，关于马来西亚选举的实证研究与公共知识一直受限于高质量开放数据的缺乏，尤其是在缺乏信息自由框架的情况下。本文介绍了马来西亚选举语料库（MECo），这是一个开放获取的面板数据库，涵盖了自1955年以来所有联邦与州级大选，以及2008年以来的补选数据。MECo包含七十年间9,704场选举竞争的候选人与选区层级数据，并通过候选人、政党及联盟的唯一标识符进行了标准化处理。该数据库还提供每场竞争的汇总统计数据（选民规模、投票率、多数票优势、废票数、未回收选票数）、候选人的关键人口统计数据（年龄、性别、民族）以及政党的谱系数据。MECo是迄今为止最完善的马来西亚选举开放数据库，将为学术研究、数据新闻与公民参与开辟新的机遇。