From The Nut Graph
By Wong Chin Huat
ONE of the best ways to understand the Hulu Selangor by-election is to look at the split-voting phenomenon. That happens when the same voter casts votes for different parties in simultaneous parliamentary and state elections.
In 2008, due to the personality and ethnicity of the Barisan Nasional (BN) candidate, MIC’s Datuk G Palanivel, BN suffered badly due to split voting. While it enjoyed a total margin of 6,374 votes when all the three state seats within Hulu Selangor were combined, this lead evaporated into a negative margin of 198 at the parliamentary level. There were also 195 more spoiled votes at the parliamentary level than at the state level. (more…)
















