Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., December 04, 2008 Kislev 7, 5769 | | Israel Time: 01:30 (EST+7)   Back to Homepage web haaretz.com Haaretz Toolbar Diplomacy Defense Jewish World Opinion National Print Edition Car Rental Books Haaretz Magazine Business Real Estate GA 2008 Travel Week's End Anglo File

Labor sets primary for tomorrow after computer failure By Roni Singer-Heruti, Ofri Ilani and Jack Khoury The Labor Party has postponed its primary election until tomorrow, after a series of technical malfunctions shut down its new touch-screen voting system yesterday. When party members return to vote again, they will use the old system - placing paper voting slips in envelopes and dropping them into cardboard ballot boxes, to be counted by hand. Labor Party secretary general, MK Eitan Cabel, announced at a press conference yesterday just after noon that the elections committee decided to postpone the primary until tomorrow, from midday to 10 PM. The committee considered party chairman Ehud Barak's request, as well as the upcoming Id al-Adha holiday and the majority of the candidates' preference in choosing the new date, said Cabel. Earlier, Cabel had announced the elections would be put off until Wednesday of next week, but that falls on Id al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, a holiday sacred to both Muslims and Druze. Protests from representatives of the two sectors quickly influenced Barak and Cabel to change the date. Advertisement Cabel added that the new touch-screen voting machines had been tested for over a month, covering every possible scenario. He apologized to the voters and candidates, and announced that a committee would be established to investigate the mishap. Cabel said the party is planning on suing the company responsible for the electronic voting system, Taldor, for millions of shekels. "We certainly will want to sue for the financial damage, and the damage to our image," said Cabel. The party paid Taldor NIS 1.5 million for the election system. Polling station personnel across the entire country complained of technical glitches in the new system, from the minute they opened. The fiasco was just the latest setback for the embattled party, as polls show Labor slipping drastically. One poll has it as garnering as low as six of the 120 Knesset seats. Voters used about every possible cliche in comparing the state of the party to the failed computerized voting system. Nissim Cohen, secretary of the Labor Party branch in Rishon Letzion, said: "I know that they will write in the newspapers tomorrow that if the party does not know how to run its own primary, how can it manage the country?" Earlier in the day, before the party decided to cancel the vote entirely, candidates called on Cabel to allow voting booths to remain open for an additional hour, and the elections committee agreed to keep the polls open until midnight instead of the planned 9:30 P.M. Other candidates warned Cabel and Barak they would petition the party's judicial organs to cancel the election results, which helped Cabel to make the decision to reschedule the primary. Candidates also received permission to increase their spending by 25 percent above the limit to compensate for the extra expenses involved in a second day of polling. Polls opened at 10 A.M. yesterday for the party's 60,000 eligible voters, in 275 polling station spread over the entire country. Voters were to have been able to cast their ballot for up to eight candidates from the national list, out of 19 who were running, and the 10 candidates who earned the most votes would occupy slots two to 11 on the slate. Voters were supposed to make their choices by pressing on the touch screens next to pictures of the candidates. In addition, voters could have selected one of the relevant regional or sectorial candidates, which would have accounted for most of the following 16 slots. At first, Cabel and the elections supervisors thought that problems existed only in a limited number of polling stations, but they quickly realized their mistake as complaints streamed in from all over the country. Despite Cabel's - and Taldor's - explanations that they had conducted tests for months, it seemed that all the possible malfunctions happened everywhere at once yesterday. Cabel refused to accept blame for the failure, saying that Taldor had accepted responsibility. In many cases, the computers simply did not respond to the voters' touches, as happened to Minister of National Infrastructures Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, himself a candidate, when he tried to vote by touching his own picture. In other polling stations, voters were told they had already voted - even though they had not - while others, such as kibbutz members, were told they did not belong to their specific voting sector and were not allowed to vote for their own candidates. In addition, the long lines led to long waits, and many simply abandoned their attempts to vote and left. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Light unto the nations Obama must help Israel break its territorial addiction. Blockade busters Israeli Arab leaders vow to sail to Gaza to break blockade.

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