In the 15th general election (GE15), Fahmi voted in the Wira Damai polling district, which had 10 polling streams. The average age of voters in the youngest stream (Stream 10) was 20.1 years old. PN received 57 percent of the votes in this stream, followed by Harapan with 33 percent.

However, in the oldest stream (Stream 1) with an average age of 62.7, Harapan marginally won with 35 percent of the vote share. BN voters, like Fahmi’s parents, made up 28 percent of the votes here, compared to just nine percent in the youngest stream.

In total, PN emerged as the winner in the Wira Damai polling district with a vote share of 47 percent. What happened in the polling district was also largely reflective of sentiments in Peninsular Malaysia, where voting patterns are split between generations.

Wira Damai is in Gombak - a hotly contested parliamentary seat in Selangor. Here, PN gained a significant amount of votes from the youth, while more senior voters supported BN or Harapan. The latter carried then Selangor menteri besar Amirudin Shari into Parliament with a marginal 43.7 percent of total votes.

In GE15, both Harapan and PN won an equal number of 71 seats out of the total 165 parliamentary seats in Peninsular Malaysia whereas BN secured the remaining 23.

If we exclude the six Peninsular parliamentary seats involved in election petitions &#9432 The granular data of 11 parliamentary seats across Malaysia are unavailable due to election petitions. , and consider only the votes of elderly voters (typically those above 60) in GE15, BN and Harapan would have captured 65 and 63 seats respectively, and PN's total would have decreased to 31 seats.

But if the preference of only younger voters, (typically those below 30) like Fahmi were counted, PN's seat count would have increased to 84, followed by Harapan with 64 seats. BN would have only won 11 seats.

Who did your neighbours vote for?

Since there is no direct method of obtaining the data on youth votes, we acquired the voting results of the groups indirectly from the GE15 scoresheet purchased from the Election Commission. The scoresheet contained the voting results of the polling districts in each parliamentary constituency.

Each district has a certain number of polling streams. The voters are allocated to different polling streams according to their age. In general, the voters are younger when the stream number gets bigger.

For example, the Taman Seremban Jaya polling district in the Rasah parliamentary constituency has 22 streams. Stream 1 was allocated to the most senior voters while the youngest voters cast their ballots in Stream 22. All those in Stream 22 were below 21 years old.

We made an editorial decision to incorporate polling districts with at least three polling streams into the analysis. Of these polling districts, only the voting results from the first (oldest) and last (youngest) polling streams were included for the analysis.

We excluded polling districts with less than three polling streams - typically districts with few voters - from the analysis. This is because in polling centres with less than three streams, we were unable to clearly distinguish between the youngest and oldest voters. Postal and early votes were ignored as they were not relevant.

In some cases, there were more than one polling station in the same polling district. In such cases, we only used the polling stations with the highest number of voters as it was not possible to directly merge data from different polling stations.

The remaining votes used in the analysis at the parliamentary level are termed as “included votes” in this exercise.

Please note that the analysis shown at the parliamentary level may not fully represent the youth voting trends due to the three reasons below.

First, the number of polling districts won by a political party/coalition if only votes from youth voters were counted, is not the same as the popular youth vote.

For example, Harapan winning 61.6 percent of the polling streams with the youngest voters in Selangor does not mean it had the support of 61.6 percent of the youth in the state.

The analysis should only be used to interpret trends, not the exact number of votes.

Second, the age range of the first and last streams of each polling district is not fixed and could be quite distinctive from one to another, subject to their voter demographics.

Third, although most of the parliamentary seats in Peninsular Malaysia had over 80 percent "included votes'', the rate is much lower in some constituencies. For example, the Parit constituency had only 44 percent of "included votes'' since many of its polling districts only had one or two polling streams, and thus was not taken into account for this analysis.

Additionally, this analysis only looks through the lens of voters’ age, and not other variables, like ethnicity, which also affects voting patterns.

The analysis is also limited, as data for 11 parliamentary seats across Malaysia were unavailable at the time of writing, pending election petitions. We also couldn’t do the same analysis for East Malaysia because most constituencies had less than three polling streams.

In conversation with political scientist Bridget Welsh, she cautioned that the voters in the highest stream number does not necessarily include only the youngest voters.

This is because voters are added onto this stream when they are included into the electoral roll. With automatic voter registration starting 2022, older voters were also included into the highest stream number.

However, in general, the average age for this stream is the lowest among all streams in a polling station.

Methodology

During GE15, PN only won six out of 22 parliamentary seats in Selangor. Looking at this alone, it may appear that PN only made inroads to the rural north and west, while the rest of Selangor remained Harapan’s bastion.

However, the polling district results show that PN’s influence is growing in Selangor, beyond what the parliamentary constituency results may show. Going down to the polling district level, we can see that PN is moving closer to the KL area, while some outskirt areas are still won by BN.

If only the ballots of the youngest voters were counted, PN would have won 37 percent of the polling districts, and BN would have been almost wiped out in Selangor with just 1.5 percent of it.

In comparison, BN still won one fourth of the polling streams with support from the oldest voters in Selangor, in particular the rural areas.

Meanwhile, in Penang, PN only bagged the three parliamentary seats in Seberang Perai Utara in GE15, whereas Harapan won the remaining 10 seats. But Harapan cannot rest on its laurels, not even on the island.

Besides the northern region, PN also captured most of the polling districts at the border between Seberang Perai Selatan and Kedah, as well as Perak. It also made substantial gains in the western part of Penang island, which is the Balik Pulau area.

Young voters were instrumental in helping PN make inroads in Seberang Perai, and notably, the southern parts of Penang island.

In states governed by PN, such as Kedah, PN had an upper hand across all generations, except in certain urban areas like Alor Setar and Sungai Petani.

A similar story unfolded in Pahang, traditionally seen as a BN bastion. If only the oldest voters had cast their ballots, BN could have won all but two seats - Kuantan and Indera Mahkota.

But younger voters in GE15 had other ideas. If only their votes were counted, PN would have emerged with a super majority, while BN and Harapan would only have secured three seats and one seat respectively.

The same analysis to determine voting along generations could not be replicated for East Malaysia. This is because a sizeable number of polling districts there had fewer voters, and less than three polling streams.

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