KUALA LUMPUR: PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli says he has accepted the party elections’ unofficial results which indicate that Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali is ahead of him in the race for the deputy presidency.
He said he has decided not to pressure the PKR Political Bureau (into doing a re-election) and has decided to concede the race.
“In any case, the results of this election is very clear. Azmin’s popular vote is only 51 per cent, a two per cent difference from my popular vote, which reflects two different streams which are equally strong and important in the party.
“The message sent by the members, which gave a win of less than two per cent to Azmin (in his capacity as a senior minister, eight-year incumbent and former menteri besar) is something that he (Azmin) has to interpret,” he said in a statement on his blog on Friday night.
Rafizi, who is contesting the deputy presidency for the first time, said there is only a 2,500 vote difference between him and Azmin, which is less than two per cent of the total voter turnout (around 114,000 members).
He believed that Azmin would be announced as the deputy president with a popular vote of not exceeding 51 per cent, compared to his vote count of 49 per cent.
“This vote tally comes amid a backdrop of questions raised on the integrity and transparency over the voting process.
“There were some controversial issues including the freedom allocated to observers from the Central Election Committee (CEC), whom from the onset have been questioned following complaints that they were being one-sided.
“The same applies to the e-voting system. There is solid proof that some votes had systematically disappeared, as presented by Akmal Nasir (new Youth chief) involving divisions which were favourable to me.
“We were also rocked by the incident involving the signal jammer in Kuala Selangor, and disconnected Celcom lines in Pensiangan.
“The most controversial, however, is the incident of destroyed data in Julau, as well as the presence of the Prey app in the e-voting tablets. On the day of the incident, the CEC admitted that the tablets were hacked and announced that they were suspending the Julau voting results. After that, the CEC changed its stand and insisted that no data was affected even though the incident did take place,” he said.
He said the Julau division (with more than 13,000 registered members) could have changed the course of the deputy presidency and other positions, as the vote difference was only around 2,500 or less than two per cent.
“I have solid basis for insisting that a re-election is held. Furthermore, the CEC had admitted to the hacking, and the IT Unit head, Alvin Teoh, was arrested by the police to facilitate their probe into the case.
“However, I understand that the interests of the struggle and the party trump everything else. We offer ourselves to shoulder this trust, in the hopes that we can bring the party to a better place and improve our service to the people.
“But if in the course of carrying this trust, the party is thrown into uncertainty and strife, then that contradicts with our original intentions of serving the people,” he said.
Rafizi stressed that his decision to concede defeat was also made after taking into account the impact it would have on Azmin, were the latter to lose.
“The impact would be bigger (on Azmin) compared to if I conceded defeat. He (Azmin) is a senior minister, a two-term incumbent for the deputy president post and a former menteri besar. His defeat at the hands of an unemployed man could be used as an excuse to withdraw himself from the political scene.”