Despite the UndiRosak movement taking place in the lead up to the 14th general election, the percentage of spoilt votes in the election may be among the lowest in recent decades.

A Malaysiakini analysis has found that the total spoilt and unreturned parliamentary ballots is 217,083 votes, a mere 1.76 percent of the 12,299,514 votes cast.

To date, the Election Commission has yet to announce official figures on the spoilt or unreturned ballots.

The spoilt votes figure is arrived by tallying official figures on the number of votes received by each parliamentary candidate (12,082,431), and subtracting it from the EC’s official voter turnout figure (12,299,514).

However, there is insufficient information to differentiate between votes that were spoilt and those unreturned.

Regardless, even if all 217,083 votes are spoilt votes, the 1.76 percent figure is still impressively low.

Based on analysis of data obtained from the EC website, which lists general election results from 1986 onwards, the 1.76 percent figure would make it the second-lowest vote spoilage rate.

The lowest rate was seen during the 2013 general election, where only 171,556 parliamentary ballots (1.52 percent) were spoilt.

 

 

It had earlier been reported that the UndiRosak movement had been gaining traction following the announcement last year that Dr Mahathir Mohamad would be Pakatan Harapan’s choice for prime minister.

Its proponents argued that voters should spoil their votes because neither BN nor Harapan represented good options.

They also said that Harapan should not be entitled to their votes simply because they disliked the BN administration that was then in power.

Meanwhile, an unofficial spreadsheet purportedly derived from the backend of the EC’s election result website has been circulating online.

Unlike officially released data, this dataset contains information on the number of spoilt votes, while other details appear to tally with what is already public knowledge.

According to this dataset, the total number of spoilt parliamentary ballots in the recent general election is a mere 161,474 votes or 1.34 percent of the total turnout.

If these figures are correct, this would suggest that the percentage of spoilt votes is even lower than that of the 13th general election.

The dataset would also mean 55,609 ballots issued never made it back to the ballot box in time.