KUALA LUMPUR: The PKR Central Election Committee has suspended the Julau division results in the PKR elections until the infected tablet devices used for voting is restored and data integration process can be carried out.
Committee chairman Datuk Rashid Din was non-committal when asked on when the results can be announced.
“We will update you on Monday,” he told the NSTP when contacted.
In a separate statement, he said that the party was investigating if the incident which took place in the division also affected other divisions where voting was being conducted.
He said that preliminary investigations found that Prey Anti-Theft software had been installed in the central committee’s e-voting tablets that was allocated for the divisional poll on Saturday morning around 4am.
Rashid said the issue was detected by the Systems and Information Technology unit under the committee around 2pm, when the e-voting system malfunctioned.
“After the checks, we found that 10 e-voting tablets which were used at the time were infected by the software.
“Reports were then sent to the cyber security team in Petaling Jaya. They found that the software was meant to erase the e-voting application in the tablet, steal data and change passwords to control the tablets by using remote computers,” he added.
Rashid said that the unit will be taking immediate measures to address the problem by changing the voting mode to offline and by shutting down the device administrator privilege, as well as uninstalling the anti-theft application from the application manager function.
The Julau polls have been plagued with controversy due to the whopping 12,946 new names that were incorporated into the party records on June 27, marking a 2,147 percent increase from the day before.
However, PKR secretary-general Datuk Saifuddin Nasution Ismail claimed that its records for the division in Sarawak were above board and approved by the party’s political bureau and central leadership council.
He also disputed claims that the addresses of about 11,000 members were suspicious and instead suggested that the portal that exposed the matter had sighted an inaccurate copy of the membership records.
Saifuddin also did not address the mounting news coverage by Sarawak media on people claiming they were registered as Julau PKR division members without their knowledge.