Who is to blame for the chaos at RSP’s convention?

As questions mount over the voting process for selecting central committee members at the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s (RSP) first national general convention, it has now emerged that the problem lies not with the voting machines themselves but with the candidate management process.

Delegates and candidates participating in the convention’s voting have been expressing dissatisfaction, saying that candidates’ names on the voting machines are neither arranged alphabetically nor in the order in which candidacies were registered.

There have also been objections that all 64 candidates were placed in a single list rather than being displayed separately by their respective clusters.

However, a senior RSP leader, speaking with Onlinekhabar, said the disorder occurred in the candidate list provided to the technicians for data entry into the machines, not in the machines themselves.

According to him, even though candidates had filed under various clusters, such as Madheshi Open, Madheshi Women, Tharu, and Tharu Women, when the final list was prepared, data was entered into the voting machines without separating those clusters.

“The final list with all 64 candidates was handed to the technicians as an open, unsegmented list. The technicians had no concern for which cluster a candidate had registered under, nor did they care about the basis on which the candidates had been ordered,” the leader said. “Whatever list the party gave, that is exactly how entries were made into the voting machine system.”

This is why delegates and candidates have been complaining that the registration numbers assigned at the time of candidacy filing do not match the serial numbers appearing on the voting machines.

According to one leader, a further complication arose when registration forms for a single cluster were collected from three different locations, resulting in the same serial number being repeated three times.

“Forms for the same cluster were distributed from three separate places. That resulted in the same serial number appearing three times,” a source said. “When all those lists were eventually consolidated, a candidate who was first in sequence ended up far down the list. That is the problem now visible.”

The leader attributed the situation to inexperience and a lack of adequate coordination in the election management process.

RSP used Ram-Laxman voting machines to elect its new working committee. These machines have previously been used in the CPN-UML general convention and by various other parties and organisations.

The technical side has not yet offered a public statement on the controversy at the RSP convention. When Onlinekhabar sought comment, Ram Prasad Rimal, a technician for the Ram-Laxman voting machines, said he would speak later.

The party’s official position on questions raised regarding the voting process, candidate listing, and cluster management is yet to be made public.