The Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) has struck the electoral version of a lottery today.

It will be the first political party to hold a lunchtime rally in town (from noon to 2pm) this General Election on Sep 7. The site is located at the promenade area beside UOB Plaza in the Boat Quay area.

According to The Straits Times, "the surprise turn was announced on Sunday evening (Sept 6), when police released a list of 10 rally sites for Monday (Sept 7)."

But this announcement shouldn't be a surprise in the first place.

According to this advisory to candidates for General Election 2015,

Police will adopt the ballot method to allocate rally sites. This is a change from previous General Elections when rally sites were allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

This means that the People's Action Party (PAP) will have a 33 per cent chance of obtaining the prime lunchtime site, if SDP and Workers' Party had also applied for it.

Guess it came as a surprise for many because the PAP in previous GEs had the resources to "chope" the rally sites by getting its activists to queue up for the sites.

In the last GE, PAP held the first lunchtime rally, while SDP got the nod for the second lunchtime rally.

PAP's GE 2011 lunchtime rally was memorable for PM Lee's apology for certain government lapses.

Missing out on the first rally slot is also frankly quite embarrassing for PAP as Straits Times reported that PM Lee told them on Sep. 5 that he would touch on PAP's policies at the lunchtime rally on Monday. Heh.

A small possibility of no PAP lunchtime rally this GE?

The advisory also has this rule:

To ensure contesting parties or Independent candidates have more opportunities to use their preferred rally sites on their preferred dates, a ‘give-way’ rule will be implemented. Parties that have been allocated a site will have to ‘give way’ to other applicants that apply for the same site at the same timeslot on the following day.

This means the SDP will not be able to bid for it again for Tuesday.

But what if there are three more political parties (WP, PAP, and the Reform Party for instance) bidding for the lunchtime slot on Tuesday and Wednesday, right up to cooling-off day (Thursday)?

This means that there is actually a likelihood of PAP not being able to hold its iconic city rally for the first time in a long, long while.

Top photo from the SDP Facebook page.

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