Labor primary to be held Dec. 4
Pubblicato da Andrea Pompozzi su 2 Dicembre, 2008
Hours after voting began Tuesday morning, the Labor party postponed the primary elections after computerized voting systems malfunctioned in several locales around the country.
Initially party leader Ehud Barak wanted to postpone the primary by eight days, to December 10, but on Tuesday afternoon, the party’s secretary general, MK Eitan Cabel, announced that the primary will be held on Thursday, December 4th.
Labor plans to sue the company that supplied it with the technology that was supposed to revolutionize the way votes are cast and counted, demanding more than NIS 2 million in damages, channel 10 reported; the primary on Thursday will be completely manual.
The polling stations opened nationally at 10:00 a.m. but some of the stations collapsed within the hour, including in Jerusalem, Rehovot, Tel Aviv, and the Druze and Arab sector. Candidates reported that voters were leaving the ballots without having voted.
The party’s elections committee initially decided to keep the polling booths open until midnight, instead of 9:30 p.m., but keeled under pressure from senior figures in the party, among them Amir Peretz, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Matan Vilna’i and Avishai Braverman, who demanded that the primaries be called off.
Barak contacted Cabel, and instructed him to make a decision on the postponement of the primaries, while stressing the importance of a reliable democratic procedure.
Under the shadow of a new poll predicting that the party will win only six seats in the February 10 national elections, almost 60,000 Labor Party members were lining up to vote in Tuesday’s primary.
According to a poll published on Monday and conducted by ‘Panels Ltd.’ for Channel 2, were elections held today, Labor, headed by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, would crash to only six Knesset seat. Labor won 19 seats in the last election.
According to the new poll, the Likud would gain 33 seats as opposed to Kadima’s 25.
The poll finds that Labor would be replaced as the largest party on the Left by Meretz – predicted to receive seven seats. United Torah Judaism and the Green Party would both get four seats, according to the poll.
The poll gave Shas 12 seats, Israel Beiteinu 11, the Arab parties 10 and the new Right-wing party Habayit Hayehudi seven.
Nevertheless, Labor officials were trying to stay positive, and on Monday senior MKs said they were hoping for the best despite the fact that this primary campaign has been characterized by no more than 70-80 supporters at each members’ rally.
Shelly Paz contributed to this report
The Jerusalem Post
