Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng said a bill to go before parliament next month will only allow a recount when the difference between candidates is no more than two percent of the votes cast in the constituency.

Wong said there was no reason why the change would not be through parliament by the end of June, the Straits Times reported on Mar 26, fitting the wide time-frame Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong has given for the next poll.

Amid speculation that the government will go to the polls this year, Goh has only said he will call the election in the second half of 2001 or the first half of 2002 -- a one-month to 13-month window before the official deadline of August next year.

Senior parliamentary secretary (foreign affairs) Zainul Abidin Rasheed was recently quoted as saying "on the ground, we are working for the earliest possible date, which could be in June."

But Goh, speaking during a European visit, said over the weekend that while the government was "ready to go at any time," he was in no hurry.

"The more time I have, the more time I have to look for candidates. There is no special hurry," he said.

Wong said the latest electoral law change was to avoid situations where "the overall margin of votes is so wide that the re-counting doesn't ... change the result at all.

"Then we will not have to waste everybody's time in doing re-counts.

In a string of electoral changes in the past few months, Singapore has said it will segregate political parties on future election nights to stifle any possibility of trouble, approved the right of overseas Singaporeans to vote, redrawn rules on political donations, and said it will introduce electronic voting in selected areas.

In a move seen as trying to widen its support base, the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) also said it would welcome singles and divorcees as election candidates -- as long as they were pro-marriage.

Compared to its neighbours, affluent Singapore is politically stable with every election in the republic's 36-year history dominated by the PAP.

At the last election in January 1997, the PAP was declared the winner without a vote being cast as the opposition failed to field candidates in more than half the seats.