ANALYSIS | The recently concluded 14th general election saw an unprecedented number of multi-cornered fights, with Umno appearing to be the biggest beneficiary.

An analysis by Malaysiakini has found that Umno managed to secure absolute majorities in only 13 of the 54 parliamentary seats it won.

In the remaining 41 seats, Umno would have been defeated if the non-Umno votes went to a single candidate. However, the votes were instead split among multiple opposing candidates, hence giving Umno the edge to win.

In the extreme case of the Tasek Gelugor seat for example, Umno’s Shabudin Yahaya won the seat with just 35.73 percent of the 51,904 ballots cast, which is the lowest winning percentage in any parliamentary seat contested in GE14.

Shabudin’s contenders, Marzuki Yahya (Bersatu) and Rizal Hafiz Ruslan (PAS), garnered 35.58 percent and 28.69 percent of the votes, respectively.

Overall in the 41 seats, the closest contender to Umno in 16 of the seats contested was PAS, followed by Bersatu (11), Amanah (5), and Warisan (5).

As a coalition, BN won a total of 46 seats with less than 50 percent of the votes in each seat.

Meanwhile, Pakatan Harapan won 33 seats under such circumstances, while PAS won nine, and an independent candidate, Tambat @ Jugah Muyang in Lubok Antu, won one.

Most of the 33 Pakatan Harapan seats affected were won by PKR (16), followed by Bersatu (8), and Amanah (6). Their closest contenders were Umno (in 18 of the seats), PAS (6), and MCA (4).

As for the nine seats PAS won without a simple majority, Umno was its closest competitor in eight cases, followed by one seat where an Amanah candidate was the runner-up.

Under Malaysia’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the candidate with the most number of votes is the one who wins, regardless of the percentage of votes.

Critics of the system argue that it encourages voters to vote “strategically” in multi-cornered fights.

For example, if two of the candidates in a three-cornered fight have similar ideologies, voters would be incentivised to vote for the one deemed more likely to win, even if he is not their preferred candidate out of fear that votes on the less popular candidate could be “wasted” in the effort to defeat the third candidate.

The effect is less pronounced or non-existent in alternative voting systems such as the preferential voting system practised in Australia, the two-round system such as in Indonesia, and the proportional representation system, such as in Germany.