What happened to Tenang By Election?

By Steven Choong

BN claimed a huge victory in last night by-election. BN wanted a big victory to create the perception that Johor is still BN fortress. Well, on the surface, they appeared to have succeeded with a 3707 majority with Dato Chua Soi Lek claiming the Chinese had gone back to support BN.

The big win by BN is nothing but a created number.

BN has access to meteorological forecast and would have known that it would be a wet period during the campaigning period as well as the polling day. Also, it is a day which was just 3 days before Chinese new year and so would be a perfect day to ensure low turn-out for non-Malay areas as those working outstation would not come back to vote.

The 2nd and 3rd generation Felda settlers also would not come back to vote. We witnessed that the government machinery were mainly deployed in Malay areas to carry voters to the polling centers. Requests from PAS to have trucks deployed in Labis Utara met with many excuses as to why a truck or boat could not be deployed to ferry voters from the town to the polling center.

Hence, Labis Utara recorded the lowest turn-out rate of 48%. Whereas, the Malay areas recorded exceptional turn-out rate with Chemplak Barat registering 89%, Felda Tenang 81%, and Chemplak 79%. The other 3 Malay majority areas were all registering above 72% turn-out rate. This would mean that the lowest turn-out rate was even higher than the average turn-out rate of 70% in 2008.

There were also incidents of phantom voters and also votes buying which all contributed to a higher majority for BN.

What if the voters turn-out rate in the 6 Malay majority areas were normalized as if they are like the other 6 non-Malay majority areas? The non-Malay majority areas have an average turn-out rate of 56% and so if we normalize the 6 Malay majority area to that of 56% turn-out rate, the majority would have reduced by about 1,350 votes and the majority would only be 2,350 votes. The overall normalized Malay support would have increased by 1% to 23%.

PAS lost in Labis Timor and Labis in this PRK. The major factor was because of low turn-out rate for older and younger voters and also the decreased support from Malay and Indian. In general, the overall Malay support had reduced from about 22% to 12% and the overall Indian support had reduced from 50% to 20%.

However, the overall Chinese support has increased from 53% to 60% with Labis Tengah registering the highest of 72% and Tenang Station the lowest of 47%. The other 2 Chinese majority areas of Labis Timor and Labis registering 67% and 65% Chinese support respectively. The above has proven that Dato Chua Soi Lek had misled the public by saying that Chinese voters had gone back to the BN.

- Steven Choong was the PKR operations manager at Tenang