Perhaps Pas could look to Umno for polls tips?
Adrian Lai, NST
WHAT was supposed to be a straightforward party election turned into an embarrassing and drawn-out affair for Pas at its 59th muktamar when the voting process was marred by a technical glitch on Friday.
The complication, which the party said was because of “mistakes in the ballot papers”, left the party red-faced when its 1,129 frustrated delegates were forced to recast their ballots yesterday to decide the line-up of the party’s central working committee (CWC).
The unforeseen boo-boo, besides causing massive delay to the day’s proceedings, ultimately resulted in dire repercussions of Pas suffering markedly dented democratic credentials.
At 4.30pm on Friday, the thousand-plus delegates were instructed to cast their ballots and elect the party’s new deputy presi-dent, three vice-presidents and 18 central working committee members.
However, eyebrows were raised when Pas’ election committee chairman Asmuni Awi stopped the voting process less than an hour after it started.
Explaining the sudden turn of events, Asmuni had said voting had to be stopped after detecting “mistakes in the ballot papers”, and that the voting process for the CWC posts would restart with the right ballot papers yesterday morning.
Asmuni said the flawed ballot papers for the CWC posts had been cast before the mistakes were detected.
Those votes would not be counted and delegates were required to vote for the affected posts again.
Voting for the other contested posts, namely the deputy president and vice-president posts, was, however, continued.
To everyone’s surprise, Asmuni and the election committee members had, on Friday, offered their resignations over the technical glitch, but were told by the party’s top leadership to continue with their work and see the election process through.
“After discovering the error, we wanted to resign en masse, as we felt that we had failed to accomplish our duties well.
“Nonetheless, the election process must continue to ensure that doubts about the election’s legitimacy do not arise,” Asmuni told delegates in an apologetic tone yesterday.
The delegates, however, were not too impressed with the goings-on.
Firdaus Masood, a Pas delegate from Johor who was debating the party president’s opening speech, slammed the irony of the situation, as many of them had previously taken the Election Commission to task in the past via the Bersih and Blackout rallies.
“It is disheartening to see that irregularities have occurred in our own party election.
“We hope that it will not happen again,” he said.
