More voters but likely low turnout

SHAH ALAM - It is expected that there will likely be a low voter turnout for the 15th General Election (GE15) due to Undi18 and the automatic voter registration.

Political analyst and lecturer from Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) Associate Professor Mohd Azizuddin Mohd Sani predicted that the number of voters for the upcoming election will be high since there was an additional seven million voters compared to the last election (GE14).

However, he said the turnout percentage will be low since the new voters involved Undi18 who are automatically registered as soon as they turned 18 and that most of them might not come out to vote for this election.

He attributed the outcome to the young voters not being aware that they were eligible to vote and facing a dilemma on which political party to vote for.

“Firstly, some of them are not aware that they are eligible to vote because they are being automatically registered.

“From one of the engagements I did in Perak and Kedah, they said they have problems in identifying which party they are going to vote for because they see that there is no difference in the political parties since the parties in the country are not ideological-based but race-based.

“So they are concerned about which party should they be voting for and because of that, they decided not to vote,” he said during the Wacana English Edition programme entitled “GE15: Dates are set, are you ready?” on Friday.

Joining Azizuddin as a panellist on the show were BowerGroupAsia senior analyst Arinah Najwa and UiTM Associate Professor Soo Wincci while Zoraya Vadillio was the moderator.

In the show, they discussed about GE15 and the voter turnout, the contesting candidates and campaigning period.

Azizuddin said some countries like Europe also recorded a very low turnout although it depended on the election they faced. However, he said it was a norm that young voters do not like politics, so they decided not to turn out for the elections.

Comparing this situation to Malaysia, he said it was interesting that the turnout rate in the country was normally very high as seen from the last election where an 82 per cent turnout was recorded.

He added that a 60 per cent turnout rate for GE15 was good enough as long as it did not record less than 50 per cent since it could bring about the authority issue of the government.

“I suspect that when it comes to this election, if we have more than 60 per cent turnout rate, then that is good already.

“I don’t want to see a lower percentage because if it is lower than 50 per cent, that will trigger the issue of legitimacy of the government,” he added.

On Thursday, the Election Commission (EC) announced that polling for GE15 will be held on Nov 19, which is a Saturday.

Meanwhile, the nomination date falls on Nov 5 and early voting has been fixed on Nov 15.

A total of 21,173,638 individuals are eligible to vote in GE15.