PKR’s central election committee (JPP) will only count some 1,000 doubtful votes from its Johor party election tomorrow.

Johor PKR members from 24 divisions – 10,725 out of the total 37,934 – voted last Sunday.

JPP deputy chairman Adzman Hedra said five more division leaders have yet to come to the party’s Petaling Jaya headquarters to verify whether the voters were party members.

“We called up 17 already. Five more to go. All division chiefs and candidates were called to the headquarters.

“So the total votes will change. It will also depend on the individual case whether the votes will be accepted or not,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

So far, the unofficial results from Johor showed incumbent deputy president Mohamed Azmin Ali ahead of his rival Rafizi Ramli in the race for the party number two post.

Azmin, who is economic affairs minister, polled at 5,852 votes compared to Rafizi’s 5,025.

But JPP’s official count showed that Azmin only got 4,503 votes while Rafizi garnered 3,976 votes.

A vote is deemed doubtful when the membership of the voter cannot be verified.

Adzman said JPP had to separate the doubtful voters because it could not immediately check their memberships to avoid disrupting the voting process.

He said it was also to avoid untoward incidents like those in Penang and Kedah when some party members were unhappy with the voting system and process last month.

On September 22, Penang and Kedah PKR were the first to go to the party polls, using the new e-voting system.

Disruptions caused unhappiness in Kedah, leading to scuffles at some voting centres. In Penang, a party member threw a chair at a press conference to protest the JPP’s decision to accept the results despite some problems with the voter registry.

There were cases of non-member voters, sacked members and members who names were missing from the list in the two states.

“To check a person’s membership, we need to use the database. It is not that we cannot do it on the spot. We tried that in Penang that day, but the process took a long time.

“So we now check the information at HQ. Whoever is found to be a non-member, the vote is cancelled,” he said, adding that there were cases of wrong MyKad numbers.

Previously, Adzman had said the doubtful voters must fill in Form 11 and their votes would be separated for further verification. – October 3, 2018.