To Ang Seng Siao,
Your title does matter to be seen but your predication has a certainty in one sense as a matter of fact. Only your content seems to be a little over-the-top (OTT) on the fact of the eligible age, duration & grassroots experience, I can simply put it as clauses or criteria, to be eligible to vote in an election.
I can safely say, the eligible voting age will remain at 18. On the matter of stay in Singapore, which is already a criteria, for the overseas voters, the last one, I don’t foresee it coming.
I would say the passing of bills or laws in the past 2 decades without any opposition either from the MPs or us, the public, were carefully orchestrated by LKY & company to make sure that the PAP will remain in power regardless of the public casting vote. So, I would say, there might be still elections in the future with you & me still casting our votes but only to be deem the whole process useless. By that time, most of the genuine opposition members would cease to exist & as they knew it is a task, which is not possible for them to win. By then there would be “fake” or “mock” opposition to satisfy the international watchdogs & observers. The only way is to break free is by an uprising & bloodshed of our children, for which we endured the atrocity from at the very beginning. Something similar to what is happening in Egypt & the rest of the Middle-East, now. Don’t say it can never happen (as much as I wished we never ever have to undergo that kind of revolution) to us; nothing in life is certain so please have an open mind. Even, the great LKY would not have anticipated the current uprising in the Middle-east, not even in his dreams or premonitions.
The current election & even the future elections can be programmed through simulations with mathematical models & the result can be determined with an outcome in values of probabilities, thus archiving the most likely outcome. This is not something new as everything in today’s application is modelled to determine the profit margin of a product, product live, business projection, concepts or services. This process of modelling in simple English is determination & the outcome of the value is formerly called probability.
I can easily get the results with a few official statics, parameters & by using Markov Chain. In simple layman term, it is possible to determine the outcome of the current state from the outcome of the previous state. You would have seen the movie titled “21”, in which the leading actor, Kevin Spacey, & a group of young mathematicians tried to “break” the casino by using probability collectively. This is proven to be true & can be archived in all finite sets of cards in the game of blackjack.
The current laws/bills create a distribution of population within a specific area which is constantly changing. Let’s look what this population consist. Though, we can say it is distributed by ethnicity (Chinese-75%, Malay-12%, Indian-8% & others-5%), in essence it has nothing to do with the elections accept to prevent further division of already our small area into territorial enclave or exclave. In another words, LKY, doesn’t want even a small sector of land roughly the size of Yishun to be Malaysia, in future. Saying these, it is possible in the future, in Johor Bahru, there is roughly the size of Pulau Ubin to be an enclave (Singapore inside Malaysia) of Singapore. I am only talking what is possible & what is not possible; I am not saying it will be certain.
Coming back to my point on Distribution, we have to see the invisible values, such as the number of civil servants which can be furthered refined to their official grade or years in service, pass casted votes. Number of businessman dependent upon the government, Number independent businessman, Number of new Nationalities, Number of new young voters (first time), The civil servant statistics already can be a complex mechanism. So, I hope you get my point. Only this variable is of paramount importance as every eligible vote is what matters to the outcome of a result. Now, you understand why the constitution (districts, town, basically area) keep on changing in every election. This is because they cannot directly control where their subject of interest stays. They cannot come out with, say that for every x teachers displaced in an area must be replaced by x amount of teacher in that same area. If there is bill passed in the parliament, then we can safely say, LKY, is literally, shooting on his foot. We will surely won’t tolerate such unjust laws which clearly benefiting the current people in power.
But it is be done is such a discreet way that it is not very visible at the “surface” level. Nobody is threaten in the civil sector or told to support or cast their vote for the government. There are ways to cajole these people, by rewarding with pay, power, recognitions, promotions & the list can go on & on, & I also want to finish this thread. It is hard to imagine like there is still this primitive law still “Your vote is a secret & failure to adhere to it will result in prosecutions” Where as in both the UK & US is not a crime to reveal which party one voted for & this information is available via “The Right To Information Act” by any public member. Needless, for me to comment further on the existence of this law, still implemented by the government till today. Though, it might be implemented to safe guard a possible riot in the early days. It is really of not much use at the current era as they can have the results at micro-level.
The last point is there is a chance in the coming general elections because of number of defectors or in the view of PAP, traitors. The family has grown too big & they cannot satisfy everyone. Anyway, half of the "white-horse" are not even staying in Singapore & are around the very best places in overseas.
