One would have expected the normally flamboyant winner of Rembau Parliamentary seat to be in a state of euphoria after the ‘big’ margin win. But he seemed sober and sullen. Did he really win the election? He knows best.

It was most unlikely for him to grab a majority of 5000+ votes in the recount after losing by a razor thin 100-odd votes. There could be several reasons:

1. The vote counters and officials were not good with numbers and inefficient.

2. The votes had been tampered with after the first count, somehow.

3. The EC representative was unreliable and incompetent.

In fact, it could have been easy to detect if there had been a fraud. The PKR candidate could have tallied the total number of votes counted in the first round and compared it to the total number of voters. If there was any discrepancy, he should have protested immediately.

Again, if the second count showed the total number deviated far from the earlier count, the PKR observers could have raised a legitimate question on the spot.

Perhaps we are not that good in arithmetic; especially when it comes to big numbers, we get confused easily. The government in the past decades had been providing us with questionable statistics of all kinds, knowing that we would easily succumb to the onslaught of immensely large and dubious figures.

However, we must not forget the golden rule: ‘You can cheat some people most of the time, most people some of the time, but it would be impossible to cheat all the people all the time’.

The outcome of the 12 ^th general election is the proof.