Julau is settled, says PKR election chief

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 13 – There will be no second round of voting carried out in Julau, Sarawak by PKR. this has been confirmed by the party’s Central Election Committee (JPP).

JPP chairman Datuk Rashid Din said the decision was made after hearing the explanation from the Operation Unit and the IT & System Unit and taking into account the Technical Report from the developer of the e-voting system, The Borneo Post reported.

“Election for Julau Branch, Sarawak will not be held again. This decision is based on a vote count analysis that proved that all data is secured and has been successfully uploaded to the cloud server even though e-voting applications on six of the tablets were wiped out by Prey Anti-Theft software,” Rashid said in a statement today.

He also stressed that the details of the votes casted and the technical analysis also indicated that no votes were missing and the results of the voting are valid.

Julau votes to be updated online

“Therefore, the results of the polls for Julau Branch, Sarawak will be uploaded in the official portal of the Party Election www.pemilihankeadilan2018.com very soon,” he said.

According to the Sarawak-based daily, the JPP also discussed the results of re-election held in Tawau and Pensiangan Branches, Sabah and were satisfied that the votes are valid.

“A check found that some of the tablets were not updated to the latest version of the e-voting application, ver8.0 (34) and because of that the result for re-election held on November 11 mixed up with the result on November 4 and 5,” he was quoted as saying by Borneo Post.

Rashid added that the results will now be uploaded to www.pemilihankeadilan2018.com website, because the data is not corrupt and can be sorted out between the old and new votes.

He expressed some concern on the “doubtful votes”, claiming that the JPP has received substantial amount of Form 11 (for doubtful voters) with the majority of them not listed as party members and therefore are automatically not eligible to vote.

“The JPP concluded that it will only conduct the Form 11 verification process for election at branch leadership positions that ended up with a draw or narrow majority. JPP will only invite the candidates directly involve to witness this process,” he said.

Chaos in PKR voting process reveal BN tactics

The voting process for PKR party polls has been a major revelation for Malaysians over how contentious and dividing it has been for the party, which had claimed to be a reformist party over the past 20 years.

The whole saga started with Rafizi Ramli challenging incumbent Datuk Mohamed Azmin Ali for the deputy president’s post. The  vice-president is also backed by PKR’s new and former presidents, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.

The divide in the party and the many chaotic episodes throughout the party polls at the branch and division levels, let alone revoting processes, has left a bitter taste for many Pakatan Harapan supporters who now see how the party seems to be operating at the same level of Barisan Nasional’s alleged voter manipulation and fraud.

Ambiga: No more about Reformasi in PKR as seen by party polls

Former Bersih chairperson and prominent lawyer Ambiga Sreneevasan took to Twitter last night to express her disgust at the party’s failures.

She feels that PKR has lost its moral right to the Reformasi slogan with the party polls being plagued with allegations of misconduct and fraud.

“PKR will soon lose the moral high ground to call itself a reformist. At the very least, it needs to believe in clean and fair elections to be reformists. They did. Some years ago. When they helped start the Bersih movement,” Ambiga said in a post on her Twitter page.

She added that PKR should know better after having criticised BN over the past two decades over all its alleged wrongdoing and interference in the country’s general election.

“PKR should not assume for one minute that the majority of Malaysians cannot see what’s going on in their elections. After all, they saw through the shenanigans of the last government and threw them out! 13,000 increase in members in one day? Really?” she tweeted, referring to the controversy around the Julau PKR polls.

– NMT