A police officer casts his ballot during early voting for the 14th general election at Perumahan Polis Parit Perupok in Muar, Johor May 5, 2018. — Picture by Firdaus Latif

KUALA LUMPUR, May 17 — A larger number of police and armed personnel voted for Pakatan Harapan (PH) towards its victory in the polls, DAP’s Ong Kian Ming said today, citing his analysis of voting data.

Ong said PH’s win came on the back of large vote swings that spanned all fourteen states and included postal votes, based on data obtained from constituencies where large numbers of uniformed civil servants formed the electorate.

“There is strong evidence to suggest that even the police and army voters abandoned Barisan Nasional (BN) in significant numbers,” Ong said in a statement today.

“The four parliament seats with more than 10,000 early voters (mostly police and army voters) were all won by Pakatan Harapan.”

Police and armed forces personnel were conventionally thought to be loyal backers of then ruling BN coalition.

The Bangi MP cited several seats as example: Setiawangsa and Batu were helmed by BN in 2013 and had a huge number of postal voters transferred in after the controversial redelineation last month, but PH still won both the seats last week.

Then Ong pointed to Lumut and Lembah Pantai, which the DAP leader claimed was gerrymandered to make it easier for Umno to recapture the seats — but the results went the other way instead.

“Without a significant number of police and army voters not supporting the BN (either voting for PAS, PH, spoiling their votes or not casting their vote), PH would not have been able to win these parliament seats.”

Ong’s seat itself provided the proof. In Bangi, out of the 1305 postal votes which were cast (mostly army votes), 471 or 36.1 per cent went to the PAS candidate, while 409 or 31 per cent went to Ong.

Only 299 or a fifth went to the BN candidate.

“I was shocked when I saw these results,” Ong said.

“I won’t be surprised if the results in many of the other seats with a high number of postal and early voters also show that a significant proportion of the army and police votes were cast not in support of the BN.”