Labor sweats over postponed primaries

Labor Party general secretary Eitan Cabel barely slept Tuesday night. The uproar over the failure of the computerized voting system and the subsequent two-day postponement of the Tuesday primaries placed him in the eye of the storm. Throughout Tuesday, and continuing into yesterday, Cabel attempted to respond to the flood of phone calls and text messages from friends who sought to encourage him and party workers wanting to register protests, all the while overseeing the military-like operation of changing the election day. Voting begins at noon today with party members casting old-style paper ballots.

"There's never been anything like this in the entire world, having to arrange for a primary within 24 hours, but in truth we've already done most of the work," Cabel said at around noon yesterday. Asked to respond to the harsh criticism aimed at him on Tuesday night from his party colleagues for his poor handling of the election, he is reluctant to do so.

"Of course I'm disappointed," Cabel said. "I'm disappointed with the anonymous reactions against me. There are people who are acting as if they've finally found their scapegoat in the party, as if I'm the one to blame for its condition. It's chutzpah to claim that we are where we are because of me, the polls on the party were released before yesterday's screw-up," Cabel said.

Cabel and other Labor officials fear that today's vote could become a fiasco if incidents of fraud are discovered at polling places. "This time it's not the computers, this time it's really me," Cabel said before correcting himself. "Us, it's the responsibility of the entire party to conduct this day correctly."

Party headquarters in Tel Aviv's Hatikva quarter was buzzing with party workers setting up the old cardboard ballot boxes before dispatching them to stations around the country. Party membership rolls were printed out for each station. Cabel spent most of the day with a telephone receiver next to one ear and his cell phone at the other. One by one, he spoke to the local party secretaries at branches throughout the country, briefing them for today's election.

"Listen up: Now it's us, our battle will be to uphold the standards in the battle for the home front," Cabel said to the party secretary in a city in the central region.

It was Cabel's decision to introduce electronic voting as a way to combat voting irregularities in Labor's last primary. Taldor won the contract after it submitted a slightly lower bid than the company hired by Likud and Kadima for their party primaries. At 10:30 A.M. on Tuesday, half an hour before the balloting was to begin, Cabel realized the mess he was in: "When the reports came in of more and more problems I realized it was all coming down. Shortly after that, when the CEO of the company walked into the room and said, 'We failed,' I realized we couldn't give them another chance and I shut it all down," Cabel related.

Labor chairman Ehud Barak reportedly considered firing Cabel over the incident, but the party constitution requires the convening of the party council for such a move.