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FAC News - Friday, July 19, 2002 8:29 AM
PAS still has the people’s
support
PAS still has the people’s
support as yesterday’s Anak Bukit and Pendang by-elections has
revealed.
In the Tenth General
Elections in 1999, PAS managed 8,480 votes for Anak Bukit and 22,413
votes for Pendang. This time around, PAS secured 8,298 and 22,542
votes respectively. This is hardly much change over 1999.
This blows UMNO's theory that
PAS no longer has the support of the Malays and that the Malays "had
returned to UMNO". If it is true that the Malays have deserted PAS,
then it must have been the Chinese who voted for PAS since the
number of votes PAS secured almost remained the same.
The win for Anak Bukit and
loss for Pendang was unexpected though as both sides had believed
PAS would win Pendang easily while Anak Bukit was tough going. At
one stage, while the votes were still being counted, PAS was leading
in Pendang by 2,800 votes while in Anak Bukit it was trailing by
about 700 votes.
Everyone thought that the
final result would show PAS winning Pendang by at least 2,000 votes
or so and losing Anak Bukit with between 1,000 to 1,500 votes. It
was certainly a surprise when the final result came out the
opposite.
Because of the belief that
PAS may not be able to win the Anak Bukit State seat, special
emphasis was placed on this seat, which was probably why PAS ended
up winning it instead. To ensure that things were under control, an
opinion poll was conducted amongst voters there.
Due to time constrains, the
same thing was not done for Pendang. Pendang had almost three times
the number of voters so more time would have been required to handle
an opinion poll there.
PAS admitted, to a certain
extent, the Anak Bukit opinion poll helped it to better understand
the issues and it was able to address these issues more effectively.
This is the first such an approach has been used in Malaysian
elections and it is believed the opposition may adopt this approach
for all future elections as it has been proved to be an effective
tool for gauging voters’
sentiments. | 