Nomination Day

Today is nomination day for the 2025 General Election.

When I was younger, I remember the PAP would form the government on nomination day itself as the opposition parties did not have enough candidates to fight in every constituency. In face during that era, there were some PAP MPs who have never had a contested election. This started to change after the 1990s when the opposition started winning some seats in Parliament.

Now every seat is contested and some constituencies even see a 3 cornered fight.

The strongest opposition party currently is the WP and they have said that they will be fielding some 36 candidates. Everyone has been talking about the caliber of the new candidates they have introduced this time around. We shall see how well they do…

The first time I attended an election rally was in 1984. I remember getting permission to skip a lecture to attend a lunch time rally at Fullerton Square. The first time I was involved on nomination day itself was in 1997, when I helped out Lim Swee Say at Buona Vista. That was quite an experience to make sure that everything was done correctly!

The last election, I was watching the announcement of the election results with friends. This was after a Japanese dinner followed by durians. That was the year the voting was extended by 2 hours because of some software issues. There were huge queues in some places because of that. So the results came out really late that year. Hopefully this year is smoother..