Rafizi raises stink over PKR’s dubious new members, voting results

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 13 — PKR’s Rafizi Ramli today highlighted weaknesses in the electronic voting used in the party elections that he said hampered his bid to challenge incumbent deputy president Datuk Seri Azmin Ali.

 

He also questioned the allegedly dubious wave of new members ahead of party polls.

 

Rafizi was responding to PKR central election committee (JPP) chairman Datuk Rashid Din’s statement earlier today, in which the latter said there will not be a re-election in the Julau division as results were secure even after a partial data wipeout by the Prey Anti-Theft software.

 

Rashid also confirmed that the Tawau and Pensiangan divisions’ voting data could be used after technical issues are sorted out and said his committee would only verify the dubious votes that were challenged in divisions where the results were either tied or close.

 

However, Rafizi said that such decisions would “victimise” PKR members who came out to vote, as he believed that the Pensiangan data and fresh voting in Julau could be in his favour.

 

“Certainly I feel that JPP’s decisions today are unfair to me and other friends and to the party members as a whole.

 

“When the data problems at the Pensiangan division is resolved, it is predicted that I will only be around 2,000 votes behind Azmin. A re-election in the Julau division (because of the voting that has lost its integrity after tablets were intruded) will give an overall advantage to me if the total number of voters that turned up exceeds 2,000 people,” the outgoing PKR vice-president said in a statement today.

 

Rafizi pointed out that a failure to hold fresh voting for the PKR Julau division would result in Azmin winning with only a narrow margin.

 

“With such a fierce voting result (if the elections in Julau is not continued and the voting data that has been hacked is used, Azmin is predicted to win with a majority ~1,500 votes from around 140,000 members that voted, which is a margin of ~1 per cent only), is it fair and transparent to use data that was hacked in Julau when a re-election can remove the doubts?” he said, adding that a victory with the small margin of around 1 per cent against various election problems would cast doubts on the “legitimacy” of the incoming PKR leadership.

 

Rafizi urged JPP to resolve problems relating to voting data in the PKR elections, also urging the committee to go through all dubious votes that he said is estimated to be around 5,000 nationwide and which he said could potentially affect voting results.

 

“If JPP’s reasoning is that dubious votes will only be scrutinised for divisions where the results were tight (involving a small margin), what about the results for Deputy President and central party council where the results difference is only around 1 per cent?” he asked.

 

According to the unofficial nationwide tally (excluding Pensiangan’s data) released on November 11 on the PKR party elections’ Twitter account, Azmin leads at 70,550 votes against Rafizi’s 66,594 votes.

 

In his statement today, Rafizi also made various accusations against PKR members or leaders.

 

Rafizi claimed that the Julau incident, which is currently under police investigation, saw the alleged failure of a JPP member tasked with ensuring the security of the tablets used for e-voting when several tablets were intruded at 4am on November 10 and installed with the Prey app.

 

Rafizi said the individual was allegedly spotted deleting the Prey app from the tablets in the Julau division, blaming JPP’s carelessness as resulting in the unauthorised installation of the Prey application.

 

Rafizi highlighted issues with the addition of new members in several divisions, noting that a PKR leader had insisted on processing new membership applications for Julau that were made via “thumb drive” without using online registration forms.

 

Apart from the alleged hacking incident, the Julau division was also plagued with controversy over its sudden spike in membership numbers.

 

He said many other PKR divisions had new applicants that bypassed the filling up of either the physical or online membership form and used the “thumb drive” method, including the Batu division and Kudat division with these two via two PKR leaders.

 

While noting that JPP had in its checks so far found that over 6,000 of the 13,000 applications for membership in the Julau division had valid membership forms, Rafizi also said that JPP had to date acknowledged that the new members sent in via “thumb-drive” brought by the two PKR leaders had yet to be backed up with valid membership forms.

 

Noting the explanation that the sudden increase of Julau members by 13,000 as being attributed to the clearing of a backlog in PKR’s membership system, Rafizi claimed that this was not the only division that had a spike in membership numbers in one day.

 

Rafizi was referring to the explanation that the backlog resulted from the system’s inability to cope with the entry of too many new members and a lack of staff to key in applications from Julau that were sent to PKR headquarters since early June.

 

Rafizi claimed that the spike in membership numbers actually amounted to 43,000 applications nationwide due to a jump in applications that were sent since May 9, alleging that these included divisions that are purportedly close to Azmin.