Word of the Day: Margin

by Tan Chu Chze

POLITICAL elections always end the same way. The recent by-election in Bukit Batok was no exemption. By that I mean regardless of which way the votes go, there will be a brief season of furious interpretation and evaluation of election results by political analysts and taxi drivers alike.

Who won, and by how much? And of course, why?

And how do these keen thinkers and tinkers answer these questions? The answers lie in the ‘margin’. Which kind of makes sense if you think of ‘margin’ to mean the edge or border of something. ‘Margins’ exists as a way of distinguishing two things — like the line between a loser and winner.

That much is easy to discern. All that is required is a simple majority: Murali won 61.2 per cent of the vote share, so Murali wins. Easy mathematics.

But no committed analyst or cabbie would settle for such a simple reading of a vote ‘margin’. And this is reflected in the shift in the meaning of ‘margin’ too.

Even though ‘margin’ originally referred to a dividing line only, its meaning now includes the space that is created from that line. Just think about the ‘margins’ in a book: when we say ‘margins’ in that context, it refers to the empty gap between the printed text and the edges of the page. The same kind of gap is of interest when it comes to vote counts — how big the difference is between the winner and loser? And what is its significance?

Was the margin between Murali and Dr Chee marginal? But compare this election’s margins with last year’s. And also the margins between each candidate’s personal performances. Those differences are by no means marginal. They both improved! And let’s not forget that marginalisation could have affected the margins. One Indian, another Opposition. Both are minority in some way…

Therein lies the tricky thing about reading into the voting ‘margins’: it puts more margins between the margins. Which leads more questions about post-election political marginalia itself: What is the purpose of analysing vote ‘margins’? Is it as meaningful as it is informative?

After all, just like margins in a book, anyone can doodle, scrawl and annotate whatever they want into a margin. Put another way, margins are just empty spaces – for anyone can fill in what they want to see.

 

Featured image by Natassya Diana.

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The post Word of the Day: Margin appeared first on The Middle Ground.

- Tan Chu Chze