How serious was the “New Citizen” effect?

by Daniel Yap - Sep 14, 2015

MUCH has been made about the role of new citizens and their effects on the recent General Election results; I have received text messages from friends, family and strangers claiming that it was new citizens who accounted for the 9.8 per cent vote swing between 2011 and 2015.

Singapore can’t survive without new citizens, so the G says, not with our current Total Fertility Rate at 1.29. But along with the naturalisation of new citizens comes tensions, especially around election season. It is assumed that all or nearly all new citizens will vote for the PAP. It is an idea that has gained some popularity here and around the world. It is true that granting citizenships or allowing immigrants in en masse has had the potential to manipulate the vote in other countries, sometimes through potential loopholes in the system as in the case of the USA, and at other times quite blatantly.

One category of messages on the topic makes a claim that the new citizen voting bloc was nearly entirely responsible for the shift in the PAP’s favour. The text points to the number of votes cast in 2011 (2,060,373) and 2015 (2,462,926). The difference of 402,533, the message says, cannot be accounted for by births, lesser deaths and it makes the conclusion that there were more than 300,000 new citizens between 2011 and 2015. This conclusion is erroneous.

One should have first looked at the number of electors – which went from 2,350,873 to 2,460,977, an increase of just 110,104. So why were there so few votes cast in 2011? Tanjong Pagar was not contested. That’s 139,771 voters. Also, 8,000 more people did not turn up to vote in 2015 compared to 2011, perhaps the effect of school holiday trips that were booked long before elections were announced. There were 47,315 rejected votes in 2015, about the same rejection rate as 2011 (just over 2 per cent), but this had little impact on the results.

Singaporeans born between 1991 and 1994 would have turned 21 between 2011 and 2015. During those years, there were just under 50,000 births per year. In 1990, 86 per cent of the people in Singapore were citizens, so I’ll make the assumption that we added 160,000 voters through births. There were about 18,500 deaths a year between 2011 and 2015, for a sum of 74,000, but not all of these were citizen deaths. Even if we include these, our net is about 86,000 more Singaporeans voting.

Read more here: http://themiddleground.sg/2015/09/14/serious-new-citizen-effect/

Credit: The Middle Ground