Malaysiakini has discovered discrepancies in various media outlets’ calculations of the popular vote tally for the 14th general election.

Popular votes refer to the total number of votes that went to each party or coalition.

Although the Election Commission has released voting data for each individual seat – the number of votes won per candidate – it has not released a summary of the popular votes for GE14.

Based on EC data, Malaysiakini has calculated that the popular votes for parliamentary seats obtained the four Pakatan Harapan component parties – PKR, DAP, Bersatu and Amanah – amounts to 5,518,638 votes.

Combined with the votes won by allies, namely Parti Warisan Sabah and then-independent Batu candidate P Prabakaran, the total number of votes won by Harapan is 5,837,283.

This means Harapan won 48 percent of the popular vote.

BN, meanwhile, won 4,080,797 votes, or 34 percent of the popular vote.

This was followed by PAS, which won 17 percent of the popular vote with 2,041,105 votes.

Other parties and independent candidates garnered 123,246 votes, or 1 percent of the popular vote.

 

In total, 12,082,431 valid votes were cast on polling day.

Furthermore, the EC announced on May 11 that voter turnout had been revised from 76 percent to 82 percent (12,299,514 people) of registered voters (14,940,624 people).

As such, Malaysiakini has calculated that the number of spoilt and unreturned votes is 217,083 votes (or 1.8 percent of voters who turned out on the day).

Different numbers

However, other media outlets have come up with different numbers for their popular vote analyses.

Malay Mail Online, which also cites the EC as its data source, has said that the total number of valid votes cast was 11,642,437, which is 439,994 votes fewer than the Malaysiakini total.

Sin Chew, Berita Harian, and New Straits Times cite a higher number of seats won by Harapan’s four component parties, compared to Malaysiakini, whereas The Star and MMO cite a lower number of seats.

There are similar irregularities for the total number votes won by BN, PAS and Warisan.

A full table of the tallies from different media outlets is shown below.