Any political alliance can win the favor of first-time voters, if they can satisfy their demands and offer better promises to solve their problems.

The 15th general election will be the first nationwide election after the implementation of automatic voter registration and the lowering of voting age from 21 to 18 following the adoption of the Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2019.

It remains to be seen whether first-time voters, in particular the 18-year-olds, will become the “kingmakers” in the coming election.

According to the latest electoral roll released by the election commission, a total of 21,173,638 Malaysians are eligible to vote in the upcoming election, an increase of 6,233,014 or 41.72% from the 14,940,624 in the 2018 election.

In other words, if half of these first-time voters do come out and vote next month, their ballots should decide who will get to rule after GE15.

There was strong anti-establishment sentiment among young voters who came out in droves to vote for Pakatan and PAS in 2018. Unfortunately, very few first-timers turned up in the recent Johor state election.

Although as many as 1.43 million took part in this state election, the voter turnout was merely 54.92%, down sharply from the 74.5% recorded in 2018, and was the lowest among the four state elections held since the last general election.

This means the drastic increase in the number of new voters will not assure us of high voter turnout.

Many might have the misperception that all first-timers are young people. Not true! Based on EC statistics, only 1,393,549 among the first-time voters are aged between 18 and 20, or a meager 6.58% of the total.

It is great that people reaching the age of 18 are now allowed to elect their representatives, but the thing is, the education these people have received at school does not imbue them with the awareness of exercising their citizens’ rights. Very few among the 18-year-olds are actually aware of the importance of the ballots in their hands.

These first-time voters can broadly be categorized into three groups. The first group comprises university students and people working in urban areas. This group of people generally have stronger political awareness and are more inclined to vote for PH.

The second group is youngsters living with their parents, and they are more likely to vote for the same people their parents will vote, especially if they are in rural areas. Their parents are predominantly BN supporters.

The last group is people totally indifferent to politics who have never before registered themselves as voters, and may not even be aware that they are already automatically registered this time. These people are relatively older. Although we do not have any official figures, their number is believably significant.

Sure enough there are also fence-sitters among the first-timers who cannot make up their minds whom to vote until the last minute.

A Merdeka Center survey among youngsters early last year showed that more than two-thirds of respondents were uninterested in politics, no thanks to the political chaos prevalent over the past several years.

The survey also showed that 78% of respondents felt that politics and governance looked too complicated to them such that they couldn’t really understand what was going on, while 66% believed government officials and politicians were not keen on what they were thinking.

Such phenomenon is by no means unique to Malaysia. A 2020 New York Times survey among readers in 24 countries indicated poor voter turnout among the young people.

From the outcome of the Johor state election, we saw that not all first-time voters were PH supporters. Many of them cast their ballots in favor of BN and PN instead.

In other words, any political alliance can potentially win the favor of first-time voters. If they can satisfy the demands of these voters and offer better promises to solve their problems, they stand a good chance of winning their hearts. To most young Malaysians, the most pressing issue is job prospect.

It is a big challenge for political parties to try to convince first-timers to come out and vote on November 19. But before that, they will have to think out of the box and map out their strategies with a new mindset in order to win over these new voters.

We should be able to get a better picture of these new voters’ inclination after the nomination day, by gauging the response of candidates’ online ceramahs.