I made a mistake the other day. I didn’t get my facts right. On election night I claimed that Khairy had initially lost by 800 votes and won by 6000. The actual number was that he lost by 100+ and won by 600. Apologies on my part.
However, the discrepancy is still something that need to be talked about. I am posting a portion of Malaysiakini’s latest news about how PKR is considering appealing and challenging the Rembau result. I think it is a good thing. But here it is:
PKR may challenge Khairy’s Rembau win
On Saturday night, the initial count for the Rembau parliament constituency in Negri Sembilan showed that PKR had taken the seat by a razor-thin majority of 141 votes.
A recount however saw a complete reversal - Khairy Jamaluddin, son-in-law of premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, won by a staggering difference of 5,000 votes.
For opposition party PKR, this stark gap came in as a shock and consequentially became a solid basis for suspicion.
Rembau’s PKR candidate Badrul Hisham Shaharin is today considering a legal challenge against the result…
“There were (also) irregularities in the vote counting procedure. The Election Commission (EC) did not issue the ‘Form 14′ to us when it was compulsory to do so,” said Badrul, a former teacher and member of PKR supreme council.
Elaborating, Badrul said that Form 14 was an extremely important procedure as the document was one of the many measures that was in place to prevent vote-rigging.
Form 14 contains the number of total voters for a particular polling station and once the vote counting has been finalised, the form will be the official indicator of the number of votes designated for each candidate.
If the form was not issued, the results could not be considered as an official one but most importantly, it gave way for manipulation as the number of votes may be added in favour of a particular candidate.
It is compulsory for the form to be issued from each polling stations to each of the candidates’ polling agents stationed there.
reporting by Syed Jaymal Zahiid.
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Click here for the full report on Malaysiakini.
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Thoughts:
The above is a very grey area. The thing about Borang 14. My friend Shazzy, whom I met up with on election night, told me about her personal experience with the difficulty of getting the official document signed to avoid any chance of rigging. While it is good to introduce a checking system, I guess it’s pretty dangerous to trust the fate of the election on one sheet of paper.
Khairy will probably win his seat no matter what happens. It’s a bit late for a challenge. But it is good to prod. And if something changes, all the better, but if not, at least shout it out to the whole world that we. are. watching.
superratty
yes, this is definitely worth pusuing, seeing that it possibly involves the most hated person in malaysian politics gaining power in an underhanded way.
anyway, from the way it played out with suspicious… shouldn’t there be a third recount straight away?
go to http://www.buckeyebadboys.com it is so awesome
They won’t ask for a re-count if it’s a Barisan win, I believe. And it would’ve been a greater hassle for the opposition to call for recount. It’s just the way it is…
Exactly Khairy is hated from the North to the South and in a recent research paper, it was cited as one of the factors for BNs stunning loss in kelantan!