70% believe Najib will win tonight’s debate with Anwar. But the results felt off…

At 9pm tonight (May 12 2022), ex-PM Najib will be debating bridesmaid-PM Anwar about the Sapura conundrum and Malaysia’s future as a whole. In short, Sapura is in deep financial doodoo – announcing an RM8.9 billion loss in January this year – and politicians are divided as to whether the government should save them. Najib is on the side of saving Sapura, arguing that it was a Bumiputra company with many downstream bumiputra companies dependent on it while Anwar says the money is better spent elsewhere. 

When the challenge was posted and accepted on April 4th, we ran a poll on our site asking just 2 questions:

• Whether Najib will FFK the debate like he did in 2015 against Mahathir
• Whether Najib or Anwar will win the debate

At first, most were thinking that Anwar would win; but when we reposted the poll on April 14th after the date and venue was set, a complete 180° happened.

70% of our respondents voted in Najib’s favor

We had a total of 639 responses collected through a Google Forms poll and also asked our friends over at NewsWav to run a similar poll on their app.

As for the first question of whether Najib will FFK, we also added an option that plot twist – Anwar will be the one FFK-ing instead. Here are those results:

But we noticed something kinda sus

When we looked at the list of individual votes, we noticed a strange pattern: On the afternoon of April 15th, there were entire strings of Najib-favoring votes. In fact, we received 319 of these votes within a 5 hour period. 

It wasn’t only the long string of votes that caught our eye, it was also the timestamps. Even in the longest Anwar-favoring string of votes, there was a gap of a minute or more between votes:

But when it came to the Najib-favoring string, that gap was just a few seconds:

So what happened? Kena cybertrooper bots ah?

Well… considering it’s no secret that cybertroopers have been (and are likely still) used in the local political sphere, it’s not an impossible explanation. However, we’re kinda placing this possibility lower on the scale since we’re a kucimiao site that probably wouldn’t be worth the budget spent for someone to spend 5 hours voting on a Google Form poll – if we even fell into their radar at all.

Perhaps it’s more likely that our poll was trolled by someone who either had a lot of time on their hands or into Najib enough to spend many hours and mouse clicks skewing the votes – both of which paint a personal life picture sadder than Sapura’s finances. Or, most plausibly, our poll reached a bunch of Najib supporters who voted how they felt.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing since we unwisely decided to turn off a sign-in requirement on the poll, thinking it was just going to be a fun addition to our coverage of tonight’s debate… we just figured we’d didn’t want people to feel that we were collecting their data (even if it actually doesn’t).

Other results show that people are betting on Anwar winning

Outside our poll, NewsWav’s results indicate more favor towards Anwar winning, and our Facebook commenters weren’t certain that he’d even show up.

But we did get 4 comments on our site that were very supportive of Najib. And yes, we checked their profiles… 3 of them look real.

But still, the thing about this debate is that the only judges deciding who wins are the audience; meaning that no winner will be announced. It’s probably still a great way to understand the Sapura debacle or at least what each leader has to say. It’ll be livestreamed at 9pm tonight on Astro Awani, Sin Chew, Sinar Harian, and Malaysia Gazette punya pages.

So…. will you be watching it with us, or nah? Let us know in the poll that now requires you to be signed in to Google below!