Undi18 as the kingmaker

SHAH ALAM - Every party needs to be smart in coming up with strategies to attract new voters especially from the Undi18 group that will become the deciding factor for every election from now on.

Political analyst, Dr G. Manimaran said, political parties need to see these new voters as "king" that will decide on the outcome of an election.

“We are looking at a total of 5.8 million new voters during the upcoming General Election (GE) or Johor state election with 750,000 voters.

“In the current political situation, looking back at the analysis of the last general election, over 30 to 40 per cent came from marginal seats at the state and Parliament level. If that is the case then every vote came from new voters.

“In fact, if the 5.8 million new voters decide to come out and vote during the General Election, it is enough to form a new government.

"This assumption is based on the number of votes for each party being within that range,” he says in an interview on Undi18.

According to him, instilling confidence among the new voters is not an easy task especially when they are now able to assess the best offer made by the contesting parties

He said the biggest challenge for the parties now is to make the new voters trust them as they are still confused about which party to vote for.

However, Manimaran also explained that party hopping issue, as well as the integrity problem among political figures, added to the lack of confidence for new voters to cast their ballot.

"Political parties must give their assurance, in the form of their manifesto and their promises, to the young people. Today we have many crises, such as a political crisis, health crisis, job crisis as well as an integrity crisis in politics itself.

"How political parties can convince these new and young voters is through their manifesto, campaigns and give them assurance that whatever crises that they are facing now, can be overcome,'' he said.

Manimaran also admitted that he was disappointed when the government did not provide any explanations and educate voters regarding Undi 18 and the implementation of automatic voter registration.

He deemed the action from the government not to promote the issue of automatic voter registration seriously, as a huge loss.

“The government has created a mechanism (Undi18 and automatic election registration) but the government is not educating the voters so that they know they can vote.

“To this day, I have not seen on television or other media anything from the government to educate the Undi18 group and new voters that they already have this system. We have no promotion, no publicity (on automatic voter registration).

“If not, there is no point in having a system like this. It is useless to spend millions of ringgit for the Johor state election and possibly up to RM1 billion in the next GE if it did not bring over 5.8 million new voters,'' he said.