What is a freak election?

I have not been blogging for while and I have not been reading my charts. That is because I am on 2 personal projects and I am quite preoccupied to get some result. I am still half way there right now and I figure I will write about it when I succeed.

Anyway, the topic for today is Freak Election. The election, or described by the forumers, Erection (that goes to show how much the locals despise the validity of Election) is coming and on 7th May 2011, Singaporeans will decide which party they want to be the next government.

Even before the parliament is dissolved, ministers started to become more vocal and warned people about reckless voting and the possibility of freak election. They warned of serious consequences such as economical failure, property devaluation and so on.

What exactly is a freak election? If according to the ruling party, anything that lead to a change in government is a freak election. However, this confuse me, if such definition fits the profile of freak election, then there are a lot of countries lately having freak election, such as Japan, Great Britain, and US definitely having a lot of freak elections.

The only way to define a freak election can only be achieved using a mathematical methology.We have to depend on probability.

In ideal case, the proportion of population support to a certain party will have the same proportion of candidates representing the people in Parliament. For instance, if you have 60% of population supporting a party, there will be 60% of MPs from the same party going to parliament.

Science teach us about non-ideal case of reality.So in reality, we will not have exactly the same proportion of MPs versus porpulation support. This is due to the random distribution of supporter in each constinuency. Even so, the difference in proportion should be relatively close. For example, you may have 60% of population supporting a single party, and ending up with probably 65% of MPs coming from the sample party going into parliament. Such relationship holds even in countries such as Zimbabwe, Iraq (during Sadam Hussen where 99% voted for him and 100% of MPs from his party).

If we are to choose a distribution system to represent the difference in proportion, say a Normal Distribution or the bell curve. The probability of a 60% support giving a 60% representation would be high. The the larger the difference between the two, the lower the probability.

If you are to define a freak event, it means that this thing should not happen. If we translate to probability, we would referring to an event of hyper low probability, such as the horse with the least chance of winning the race wins.

Therefore in the event of an election, a freak election can only means a 66.6% support for a single praty resulting in 97.6% of MPs (82/84) represented by the same party in parliament. To a mathematician, what is the probability that such event can happen? I would say it is at the far end of the normal distribution or bell curve. Such behaviour is unnatural and I can only said is man made and engineered to ensure the distribution in every consittuencies having same proportion of voters for each parties.

Yet it is only in Singapore that such freak election happens, not only that, it happens so often that it is a norm while a normal election result is deemed as a freak event! Certainly such phenominant can really put Singapore absolutely unique.