BAD MATH! DAP, PAS, PKR individually lost popular vote to BN

Incredibly, some people are, 26 days on, still mystified by May 5′s aftermath but here goes: Barisan Nasional triumphed handsomely to indisputably re-constitute the government after securing 133 parliamentary seats, well above the required first-past-the-post 112 but short of the magic 148 to win by a super majority.

However, opposition disinformation is pestering the electorate to presume that the BN somehow lost on two counts — unproven fraud and the so-called “popular” vote designed to coerce the BN to capitulate and surrender Putrajaya.

The DAP, in seizing a Chinese tsunami-inspired 38 seats, is still no closer to their leaders’ lifetime fantasy of co-ruling while Pas lost Kedah (and Perak, if you need to be picky) and PKR their overall 2008 gains although Kelantan and Selangor were fortified as strangleholds.

Pas and PKR were stumped by an Umno rejuvenated by Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s earnestness in picking up the post-2008 shattered pieces while Sarawak and Sabah BN stoutly stood their ground despite the massive ground assault.

BN’s blot? The MIC outperformed expectations but for the near-deaths of MCA and Gerakan, scrambling now for salvation through a speculatively inventive single multiracial party.

Putrajaya was a tantalising mirage when the polls results knocked the wind out of the defacto PKR leader’s premiership fixation. But it did not crush his dangerously fading agenda of incessantly fibbing about a “fraudulent” election — a “monstrous” lie as Dr Chandra Muzaffar indelicately put it, or as we’d like to put it, the sorest loser.

The loathsome soiree between Anwar and the dynastic duo of Lim Kit Siang and Lim Guan Eng needed to save face and appease a frustrated Chinese protectorate gifting them the record 89 seats by concocting the ridiculous disinformation campaign that the opposition, morally, won by edging the BN on the “popular” vote.

Nice try but wearied people have disavowed the disinformation. Unruffled, the opposition is determined not to lose its perception war by resorting to massive rallies, idiotic 100,000 police reports and clumsy sedition — overthrowing the government within a year on the noisy clamouring of a vicious street mob and its contempt of established court practices to hear election complaints.

The loose cannons spewing the allegedly seditious “overthrow the government” utterances have been deservedly arrested and charged, Malaysia’s rule of law decisively at work despite the predictably lame protests of political meddling, the ultimate argument of people who have lost the plot.

Strangely, the ragtag opposition is schizophrenic on the escalation of mob marauding: Pas emphatically dismissed it, key senior DAP and PKR leaders have disassociated themselves from it but the Lims are still two-faced about it, enjoying their reign in Penang but buttressing anyway Anwar’s nihilism.

Still, one cannot get over the engineering to overthrow this democratically-elected government that was fuelled by these humdingers — the logistically impossible deployment of immigrant workers to vote surreptitiously and the hindrance of legitimate voters by certain oppositionists’ fascist thuggery of racial-profiling, scapegoating and bodily harm.

Debunking the “popular vote” fairy tale will be difficult: the gullibly belligerent presuming that total votes counted (proper description for the so-called “popular” vote) split three ways, the highest to the PKR, followed by DAP and Pas, can amount to a singular but “mythical” united force. The myth is cynically perpetuated on the deceitful sloganeering of racism, corruption and rigged polling, consistently rubbished as fabrication but still eagerly consumed.

Eventually, the “popular” vote battle cry was bound to sink on its hysteria: losing BN Shah Alam candidate Zulkifli Noordin, formerly of Anwar’s legal team to fight his sodomy charges, crunched intriguing numbers that deflated the “popular” vote moralising.

Here’s how Zulkifli clarified total votes counted, starting from the biggest gainers:

Barisan: 5,237,699 or 46.53 per cent (133 seats); PKR: 2,254,328 or 20.03 per cent (30 seats); DAP: 1,736,267 or 15.42 per cent (38 seats); Pas: 1,633,389 or 14.51 per cent (21 seats); and, others: 192,904 or 1.71 per cent (no seats).

Zulkifli argued that Anwar’s claim that his troika won the “popular” vote is “twisted logic” on these aspects:

DAP-PKR-Pas axis contested on separate symbols of rocket, eye and moon without a unifying symbol like the BN’s “dacing” and further aggravated by its unregistered status; and, the “incentuous” battles where Pas and PKR fought each other but yet added the sum total as part of Pakatan’s “popular” vote.

The conclusions from these numbers are clear: Anwar’s troika plus scattered opposition votes were expediently counted as a unified entity when the reality is that the three conflicting parties merely put up a good show, no matter how dubious.

Seen from this discrete prism, PKR, DAP and Pas lost the so-called “popular” vote but are maladroitly re-inventing the rules to salvage their lost cause.

What is it then? A juvenile attempt at power grabbing by sheer determination and double-dealing. However, Anwar and the Lims are too vengeful to spot the hypocrisy and irony.