Barisan Nasional only gained about 51 percent of the popular vote from the 7.9 million ballots cast on Saturday.
However, it took 63 percent of the seats contested - or 140 of 222 seats in Parliament.
Interestingly, its peninsula-wide popular vote was only 49.79 percent, which effectively means that the opposition received the majority vote in this part of the country.
However, when converted to parliamentary seats, BN has 85 of the constituencies in the peninsula, while the opposition bagged 80.
Almost 40 percent of the BN's seats are in Sabah and Sarawak - 55 out of 140.
In 2004, BN won about 64 percent of the popular vote nationwide and 92 percent of the 219 parliamentary seats on offer then.
Key non-Malay parties in BN have been reduced to 20 seats (MCA - 15, MIC - 3 and Gerakan - 2), making the ruling coalition predominantly Malay. On the other hand, the opposition appears more multiracial with PKR (31), DAP (2
and PAS (23).
PKR: Khairy's Rembau win suspicious
Rembau’s PKR candidate Badrul Hisham Shaharin is considering a legal challenge on the result for the parliamentary constituency which was won by Umno Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaluddin.
Speaking at a press conference held at the Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur today, Badrul (photo) said he was far from satisfied with the final outcome of the result for the seat.
He said that the initial count showed that he had won the seat by a razor-thin majority of 141 votes.
A recount however saw Khairy, also the son-in-law of premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, winning by a staggering difference of 5,000 votes.
For PKR, this stark gap came in as a shock and consequentially became a solid basis for suspicion.
“(And) there were (also) irregularities in the vote counting procedure. The Election Commission (EC) did not issue the ‘Form 14' to us when it was compulsory to do so,” said the PKR supreme council member.
Explaining on the matter, Badrul said that the Form 14 was an extremely important procedure as the form was one of the many measures that was in place to prevent vote rigging.
Form 14 contains the number of total voters for a particular polling station and once the vote counting has been finalised, the form will be the official indicator of the number of votes designated for each candidate.
If the form was not issued, the results could not be considered as an official one but most importantly, it gave way for manipulation as the number of votes may be added in favour of a particular candidate.
It is compulsory for the form to be issued from each polling stations to each of the candidates’ counting agents stationed there.
Commenting by HaloScan
