PETALING JAYA, 27 May: The PKR election results for the Ampang branch, which was published on the PKR official website, is being doubted because the voting held previously was confirmed to be cancelled.
The decision to cancel the election for the branch was made by the Election Supervisory Chief when candidate representatives for the position of Branch Chief found that the ballots in the ballot box exceeded the number of members who voted.
The cancellation should be done in accordance with regulations contained in the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which was issued by PKR; which states that an election has to be cancelled if there the difference exceeds 30 ballot papers.
According to sources, the ballot papers issued for the Branch Chief position was 1,151, while the number of voters who voted was only 1,115; a surplus of 36 ballots.
“If the ballots are less than the turnout, it is logical because sometimes voters take the ballot papers but decide not to vote for some reason. But if the ballot papers are more than the names cut-out, this is strange.
“The Central Election Committee (CEC) itself earlier said that if all candidates agree to a cancellation, then it should be cancelled and moreover, the difference of 36 votes is not in question because it is clearly stated in the SOP that even though it exceeds 31 ballots, it still will be nullified,” said a PKR insider when met by Selangor Kini at the PKR headquarters.
The source added that the CEC only contacted the candidate representatives on Tuesday, two days after the polling day, and asked them to send representatives to the counting process.
What was even stranger was that when the ballot counting was carried out at the party headquarters, the previous difference of 36 ballots was found to have changed to only seven.
“As though 29 more voter names have been cut-out, otherwise how could it have increased suddenly? Candidate representatives have checked carefully; the difference was 36 ballots during the polling day. For two days, the ballot boxes ‘fermented’ at the PKR headquarters without monitoring. Anything could have happened.
“How could the number of voter names cut-out increase suddenly? No one knows what happened during the counting process because candidate representatives did not send representatives to the re-count process because they did not validate the re-count. It is clearly stated in the SOP that the polling should be cancelled.
“The Form 14 which was cancelled was also confirmed to have been cancelled with the signatures of candidate representatives as witness and the Election Supervisory Chief himself signed and stamped it,” added the source.
The source added that he understands that candidate representatives have met the Central Election Committee (CEC) Chairman, Datuk Johari Abdul, but their objections were rejected without any solid reason.
“I believe they are making a second objection. This time, the hearing for the objections will be handled by the Election Complaints Committee (ECC) because some friends said that they bumped into candidate representatives at the headquarters in the evening,” the source added.
