MCF Election 2013

The MCF AGM was held on Sunday, 10th March at Olympic Council of Malaysia (OCM) in one of the halls there. I was there to meet up some friends who were attending the AGM. No outsiders were allowed into the meeting so I sat in the cafe with another non-attending friend. Only the state delegates and the current MCF council members were in the meeting. The only exception seems to be IM Mas Hafizul who for some reason was invited (or maybe he was a delegate for Kelantan, I'm not quite sure)  but he left the meeting after a short while.

The meeting started from 10:00 AM and ended around 2:00 PM when the attendees started streaming out of the hall and into the cafe. What most of us were interested in was the elections, especially the post of President. This was a two way fight between the incumbent, Tan Sri Ramli and the Vice President, Zuhri.

One of the hotly contested argument was that the sitting MCF council members had voting rights in the election. I understood that this was always the practice but Zuhri and his supporters tried to change this. Eventually the motion was dropped and the voting began. The total number of voters was forty. Voting was by secret ballot and this may or may not be advantageous to either candidate.

When the votes were counted, it was a dead heat! Both candidates had the same number of votes i.e twenty each. Unprecedented! Well actually it is because there has never been a fight for the presidency , in my memory. No contest until this year.

There were discussions on how to proceed next. Some wanted to adjourn and come back to vote another day. This in my mind was not the best solution as there are many from other states who have to return to KL another day. So the decision was to have a second round of voting.

There is the interesting part to this vote tie. Eye witnesses told me that when the tie was announced, both Zuhri and Tan Sri Ramli were stunned, meaning that both had expected to win handily. And this means that some who had promised to vote one way had reneged and voted the other. As they say, in politics there are no permanent friends nor enemies.

So the voting began anew. I was very sure that there will be no tie this time and I told my friend so. There will be switches of allegiance anew. I was right for the results came back with Tan Sri Ramli retaining his post with 21 votes while Zuhri got 16.

Sharp eyed readers will notice something not right. There were total forty votes (20-20) in the first round but only 37 votes in the second? What happened to the three remaining votes? Did they abstain or spoilted their vote deliberately? No one will ever know because the voting slips were shredded after the votes were counted.

So now we have a new council, hopefully they will get down to work.