{"id":65856,"date":"2017-05-06T22:22:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-07T04:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=65856"},"modified":"2017-05-06T03:55:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-06T10:55:47","slug":"joint-opposition-can-win-117-seats-in-a-parliamentary-election-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/05\/06\/joint-opposition-can-win-117-seats-in-a-parliamentary-election-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Joint Opposition Can Win 117 Seats in a Parliamentary Election Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dilrook Kannangara<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

This is an estimate of voting power of each party can be assessed based on the ground extent.<\/p>\n

All grounds were packed so their extent can be used as a gauge of strength. SLFP, JVP, UNP and JO held their rallies in grounds with the extents of 2.4, 2.4, 3.8 and 18.7 acres each.<\/p>\n

Minorities generally don\u2019t attend may day rallies which is an annual feature. A few would attend CWC and other rallies but these don\u2019t come any closer to major parties. Therefore the 25% minorities are allocated to major political groupings by 2015 August election results (20% to the UNP-TNA-SLMC and 5% to SLFP-ACMC-CWC part of it tickling down to the JO).<\/p>\n

These are the resultant percentages and number of parliamentary seats if a parliamentary election is hel<\/p>\n

JVP \u2013 7% (13 seats) <\/strong><\/p>\n

SLFP-ACMC-CWC \u2013 12% (25 seats) <\/strong><\/p>\n

UNP-TNA-SLMC \u2013 30% (70 seats) <\/strong><\/p>\n

JO \u2013 51% (117 seats)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Joint Opposition has a clear and unassailable advantage over all other parties. With a likely win of 117 seats, the JO can face a parliamentary election alone and win. As the single largest political party, it can easily win 14 district bonus seats (included).<\/p>\n

However, despite a 51% votes percentage estimated, it may not go the JO way at a presidential election. This is because at a presidential election, UNP, TNA, SLFP and JVP will most likely contest once again from the same platform against the JO. If these parties held a May Day rally together, it would have easily become much larger than the sum of their individual rallies. Though still smaller than the JO\u2019s rally, when minority votes and upper and upper middle class sections of the society that never participate in May Day rallies are factored, a combined coalition (Swan Alliance) will edge out the JO in a presidential election with synergy supporting them.<\/p>\n

Election fraud in the north, east, Nuwara Eliya and Colombo districts and double voting by a significant percentage of voters in these districts will also tip the scales in favour of the Swan Alliance. In a parliamentary election, the impact of double voting is confined to the district. Even if, for argument sake, a district has a 90% voters turnout due to fraud, the total number of seats that district can have will not change. Due to the formula of allocating seats, the impact will be further dented. No matter how peaceful the election is, the affected districts are UNP-TNA-SLMC strongholds. UNP-TNA-SLMC wins them almost by default.<\/p>\n

Incumbency advantage is huge in a presidential election whereas it is relatively small for parliamentary elections. All incumbents won a second term in presidential elections. <\/strong>Mahinda is the only incumbent to lose a presidential election.<\/p>\n

All contesting presidents won the second term which is a 100% success rate for the incumbent. However, in parliamentary elections, only 4 out of 15 elections had the incumbent ruling party winning it. A miserable 27% success rate. In other words, the JO has three times more chances of winning a parliamentary election than a presidential election.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The JO has reason to be confident of winning a parliamentary election, however, it should not be cocky about winning a presidential election. At least not yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dilrook Kannangara This is an estimate of voting power of each party can be assessed based on the ground extent. All grounds were packed so their extent can be used as a gauge of strength. SLFP, JVP, UNP and JO held their rallies in grounds with the extents of 2.4, 2.4, 3.8 and 18.7 acres […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dilrook-kannangara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}