Monthly Archives: April 2013

Election Cam-pain

3 Replies

Some interesting campaigning is going on in my neighborhood of Segambut, P117, where Jayanti Devi Balaguru of GERAKAN, under Barisan Nasional, will contend with Lim Lip Eng of DAP, under Pakatan Rakyat.


Here, in Segambut Dalam, we see Barisan Nasional chairman and incumbent Prime Minister, Najib Razak, on what appears to be a bottle!


Another view from the side, with Jayanti at the neck of the bottle.


View from the other side of the road, Jalan Segambut.

Interestingly, this road used to be full of BN and DAP banners. The DAP banners have since disappeared. One could suspect the BN party workers of removing the DAP banners, but that also means that DAP has less flags to take down after the elections.


Meanwhile, closer to home, is an interesting poster – it used to be just Najib Razak on a poster, with the caption, “LET’S VOTE !” with that horrible space before the exclamation mark. That is just bad, bad English. However, sometime this week, another poster was overlaid in front, this time featuring the incumbent Deputy Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin.


At the same junction, you see the same thing – Najib Razak’s original poster, overlaid by another poster featuring his favorite right-hand man.

However, the address on my NRIC is in PJ, so I will be voting there instead. The other benefit of that is that I get to vote for a Parliament and State candidate. If I changed the address to this one in the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, I’d only get to vote for a Parliament candidate.

All pictures can be clicked for a larger view.

Election Math

Leave a reply

Ignoring who you are voting for, what kind of situation would you like?

A) BN wins by a supermajority
B) BN wins by a simple majority
C) BN wins by a jaguh kampung majority
D) PR wins by a jaguh kampung majority
E) PR wins by a simple majority
F) PR wins by a supermajority

Supermajority = more than 2/3rds of Parliament
Simple majority = more than 50% of Parliament but less than 2/3rds of Parliament
Jaguh kampung majority = more than 50% of Parliament but less than 2/3rds of Parliament and the total votes are less than 50%

The Jaguh kampung majority happened in 1969, when the Alliance (UMNO, MCA, MIC) + SUPP won 65.67% of the seats with 49.3% of the total votes. The Opposition (PAS, Gerakan, PPP, DAP, etc.) had 50.7% of total votes but only 34.33% of seats.

If you have more than 2/3rds of Parliament, you can change the Constitution.

Now I would personally like either C) or E) to happen. 2008 results were B) and you could say that the sentiment has swayed towards PR, but there are new dubious voters and the EC has doubled the number of classrooms to vote in (meaning that you need twice as many Polling Agents and Counting Agents to make sure no cheating happens.)

As much as I am tempted to vote BN to ensure that F) does not happen, I know BN has already implemented measures to make sure that B) or C) happens.

In a fair election, the percentage of parliament seats should be equal to the total vote percentage. Every voter should have equal voting power. (In Singapore, 60.14% voted for PAP but they got 93.1% seats, not fair either!)

So how does this happen? Some seats are smaller than others, like in 2008 where Putrajaya had 6