Kuala Lampur, April 28 -- There is a film about GE14 that I have been thinking about lately: RISE: Ini Kalilah. Not because it was a good film by any measure, but because it captured the democratic tension surrounding the single act of voting. Malaysians abroad scrambling to get postal ballots home in time and physically transporting other people's votes. The urgency of it. The idea that one ballot, lost somewhere between London and Kuala Lumpur, could mean something.

The belief that the vote was everything - that it was the whole of what democratic citizenship could be. And in 2018, in a country that had spent sixty years under the same government, you could understand why.

What I have been sitting with, though, is how much that belief...