Tharman Shanmugaratnam will be Singapore’s next President after securing a landslide victory with 70.4 percent of the vote.
The final result, announced by the returning officer shortly after midnight on Saturday (Sep 2), put Mr Ng Kok Song in second place with 15.72 percent, followed by Tan Kin Lian, who received 13.88 percent.
There were 50,152 rejected votes, representing 1.98 percent of the total votes cast.
The figures were largely unchanged from an earlier sample count, which had the three men at 70 percent, 16 percent and 14 percent respectively.
That showed that voters put aside their political differences when they cast their ballots for Mr Tharman in Friday’s poll, said Associate Professor Eugene Tan from Singapore Management University’s (SMU) School of Law.
“We’re looking at more than two-thirds of Singaporeans who voted for Mr Tharman, which means that he would have got votes from people across the political spectrum, although this is not a political contest, to be clear. More significantly, this is really the uniting of Singaporeans,” he said on CNA’s TV special on the Presidential Election.
The counting of votes started after polling stations closed at 8pm, with more than 2.7 million Singaporeans expected to have cast votes in the country’s first contested Presidential Election since 2011. Speaking to the media after the sample count was announced, Mr Tharman said he was “truly humbled” by the strong endorsement by Singaporeans.
“I believe that the vote for me and what I stand for is a vote of confidence in Singapore,” he said. “It’s a vote of optimism for a future in which we can progress together and support each other as Singaporeans.”
Later, he posted on Facebook about this: “It can, and must, be a future of deeper respect for each other, regardless of backgrounds and educational achievements,” he said. “A future of closer interactions between our different faiths and cultures, so that we deepen our multicultural identity. A future of solidarity even as we hold to diverse views, which is natural in our democracy.”
-CNA
