AL Elections | Who are the Macau voters?

With the approach of the vote day for the 2017 Legislative Assembly (AL) elections on September 17, the number of presented lists is growing steadily along with the preparations for the campaign period.

According to the official data, this year’s election will welcome a total of 25,138 new voters that registered to cast their ballots for the first time.

To learn more about the profile of Macau voters and how this election’s new voters might or might not influence changes in the political panorama, the Times researched what the typical voter in the region looks like.

The analysis of several records of both returning voters and new voters in particular, made available by the Electoral Affairs Commission for the Legislative Assembly election (CAEAL), resulted in the acknowledgement that the typical Macau voter is a woman, aged between 45 to 64 years old and born on the mainland.

Also well represented in the population sample are men born on the mainland, but with their ages ranging from 50 to 64 years old. This represents  the second largest group of potential voters.

The growth in the figures of the age groups 25-29 and 30-34 is mostly due to the registration of new voters during last year (January to December 2016) and also during 2012 prior to the 2013 elections.

The referred age groups, where the difference between genders is negligible, is already accountable for 18.5 percent of all the voters registered for this year’s election, thus these groups are expected to have some influence on the final outcome.

Similarly to the larger groups of voters, the predominance among new voters are still those residents born outside the region, with a larger incidence to the ones born on the mainland (49.5 percent against the 54.4 percent among the total number of voters).

The number of residents born in Hong Kong registered as new voters is also on the rise (+0.8 percent) and those born in Macau (+6.5 percent).

Noteworthy is the relationship between the larger voter groups and the total population figures. When compared to the latest official figures from the 2016 population by-census of the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), the official number of registered voters show that, contrary to what has been mentioned several times, not all groups of younger citizens have been growing.

DSEC notes in the report that the “local population in 2016 were concentrated in the age groups of 25-34 and 50-59, altogether accounting for 35.2 percent of the local population.” For the younger cohort (18-24 years old), the percentage of local residents registered to vote is slightly under 50 percent, while in a wider range for older citizens (50-64 years old), it reaches an average of two-thirds of the total population.

The figures also show that the number of voters within the younger groups have been falling. The number of individuals in the 18-24 category registered about 3,500 fewer voters in 2016 than in 2012, which would suggest a relatively lower impact of the young generation on the direct elections for the AL.