Why Singapore Elects the Losers of its Elections

There are two ways to win elections in Singapore.

You can, of course, win the old-fashioned way: by receiving more votes than your opponent.

Alternatively, you can also win by receiving fewer votes.

That’s exactly what happened, in fact, just two weeks ago, when the Workers’ Party won

a seat in Parliament despite losing 47% to the ruling party’s 52% in the Tampines constituency.

Now, in many countries, a party that wins, say,

a third of the vote, receives a third of all seats in parliament.

But this is not that. Voters in Singapore are told to pick a single candidate. The one

who receives the most votes — even just by 1 vote — wins that entire district,

like the United States. But then, their opponent — who may have received just 15% of the vote — is

also offered a seat in parliament, despite being overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

The only thing stranger than letting the “losers”

of an election win is who came up with this idea: the winners.

When the People’s Action Party created this system in 1984, it held 97% of all seats in parliament.

This was not an “insurance policy” in case one of its own candidates lost an election.

The lowest share of seats it has ever held in the country’s history is 89%.

And it specifically wrote the law to benefit its competitors, not itself.

The way it works is by setting a minimum number of opposition members of parliament — originally 3,

now 12. Meaning, if voters only elect, say, 5 candidates who are not members of the ruling PAP,

the government then offers extra seats to 7 of its adversaries — 7 members of

the opposition who came closest to winning — the quote “best losers.”

In other words, Singapore’s ruling party — one, I should add,

notorious for its authoritarian tendencies — used its absolute,

unchecked power to manipulate the outcome of elections in its opponents’ favor.

…Guaranteeing that no matter how Singaporeans voted, the opposition would always get elected.

And it did this completely voluntarily — without public pressure. In fact, the opposition rebelled

against it, refusing the “free” parliament seats offered to them in the next election.

The real purpose of this scheme, they argued, was to create the appearance of democracy

where there was none — ironically, by doing something deeply un-democratic:

asking voters to choose their representatives only to then elect those they rejected.

In the four elections prior to 1984, the PAP won every seat in parliament — a margin of

victory one expects from North Korea, not a true democracy. By guaranteeing

the presence of an opposition, the PAP could avoid this embarrassment.

Crucially, it could reap these rewards without actually giving the opposition

any real power. Even if all 12 opposition members vote together,

they don’t stand a chance against the PAP’s 89% majority.

Plus, the genius of electing them this way is that it entraps the opposition. If they accuse

the PAP of being un-democratic, the PAP can turn this accusation back on them: by accepting the

seats given to them un-democratically, the opposition is implicated too.