WILL YOU VOTE BLINDLY AT THE NEXT GENERAL ELECTIONS?

GE is coming!

Ever since the next general election for Singapore have been speculated to be in the year 2015 the social media space in Singapore have been experiencing an explosive quantities of updates regarding the general election.

However recently 2 very unique status updates on Facebook caught my eye when I was browsing for information regarding the oppositions. The updates were from Roy Ngerng aka the Hero of Singapore (self proclaimed) and a page named The New Era, both of them were sharing this same image titled “How to Vote GE2015″. The image serve as an instruction on how to vote during the next election, specifically it instruct the voter to simply vote opposition, in case of a multi-cornered contest it even provided an “order of preference” for voters to follow.

While it is every supporter’s rights to drum up support for their party and candidate of choice it is quite absurd to unabashedly ask voters to blindly vote for the opposition regardless of whoever is contesting in the ward. This is the General Election we are talking about here, we should be comparing the qualities and character of the candidates carefully from different party before making the very important decision of voting for them.

I accept the fact that certain hardcore opposition supporters will have the mindset that any candidate from the opposition is better than any candidate from the PAP, even if we were to accept such an argument then shouldn’t we be looking at comparing the individual candidates from the different opposition parties before making a choice? Nope, Roy Ngerng and The New Era somehow have decided that when oppositions pit against each other any candidate from Worker Party is better than any candidate from SDP, any SDP candidate is better than any candidate from SPP and the list goes on……

And they say the PAP is authoritarian?

It comes as a surprise when the opposition supporters whine all day along about the PAP’s suppose authoritarian behaviour but then went on to directly instruct the electorate to vote in a precise and rigid manner. Roy Ngerng and The New Era is encouraging group think by asking the electorate to vote blindly, anyone who is even remotely interested in political studies know that group think is one of the most dangerous element in politic as it can lead to ruling parties being apprehensive towards advice that did not originate from the group itself.

Order of preference base on………simply preference?

There was also no rational given as to how the “preference” order of the parties were being decided. Why is the Worker Party at the top? Do The New Era and Roy Ngerng have first hand knowledge of who will be the candidates from the opposition camp who will be competing for votes against each other hence they were able to decide which party’s candidate to vote for even before the GE begin? I can only hope they are base on some complex algorithm we mortal cannot understand and not just The New Era and Roy Ngerng’s personal preference.

Conclusion: I believe that the general election is a very important event that allow us to vote for our preferred party and candidate to lead us in the next 5 years. For us to vote blindly for during the general election is an insult to our forefathers whom we inherit this country from.

One last loose end to tighten: being the curious person that I am, I reach out to the PPP to try and understand how they feel to be rank at the bottom of the order of preference by The New Era.

The Social Commentator