DAP banks on new voters to help sink BN

The DAP believes all that is needed to topple BN’s 55-year reign of “cronyism, corruption and abuse of power” is for the bulk of the three million newly-registered voters to vote against the ruling coalition.

“If 70 percent (2.1 million) of these voters cast a vote against the BN, it would deliver 123 parliament seats to Pakatan, enough to form a new government in Putrajaya,” said party parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang in a statement.

However, he clarified that this is assuming that the 2008 voting patterns still prevail.
  
Though Lim did not mention if his prediction accounted for the distribution of the new voters and where they will vote, a detail that may decide if their presence will give an impact or not.

The three million voters would not make much of an impact overall, if all were registered as voters in already opposition-friendly Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, for example.

Lim was referring to the almost three million newly-registered voters on the electoral roll since the 2008 general election, almost a quarter of the 13 million total voters in the current electoral roll.

Approximately 60 percent of these voters are below the age of 60.

“Many of these voters have been motivated to register because of the possibility of political change in the next general election,” posits Lim.

He believes that a new generation is rising up to reject the old style politics of the Mahathir Mohamad era, as evidenced by the 1998  Reformasi and the more recent Bersih electoral reform movement.

Lim claimed this goundswell was responsible for the political tsunami which swept BN away in Kedah, Penang, Perak and Selangor and took away their two-thirds parliamentary majority.

The role of the newly-registered voters, he argued, is even more crucial with the alleged presence of the many phantom voters in the electoral roll in what is expected to be the dirtiest elections in Malaysian history.