CS Amina to defend World Motor Sports Council seat

Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed and Surinder Thatthi are expected to defend their seats during the World Motor Sports Council General Assembly in Paris, France on Friday. 

The council is the Federation Internationale de I’ Automobile’s (FIA) supreme organ.

CS Amina will be looking to retain her position as a member of the council and Surinder, the vice president’s seat.

The assembly will elect a new president to replace Frenchman Jean Todt. He is not eligible for election as per the FIA statutes after having served for 12 years made of three terms of four years each.

Briton Graham Stoker, the FIA deputy president for sport and a council member too, will be going for the top seat. Stoker has been FIA vice president since 2009. His sole challenger is 14-time Middle East rally champion Ben Sulayem of  Dubai, UAE.

Friday’s elections will be historic in the sense that they will be done electronically for the first time owing to challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Until 2019, a member who was not present at a General Assembly was allowed to vote by proxy or by officially authorising another member present to cast a vote on his or her  behalf.

FIA settled on LUMI — the leading worldwide supplier of registration and electronic voting technologies  — to provide voting equipment. 

The firm has worked with other big sporting organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and World Athletics; in the financial sector HSBC and major brands such as Coca-Cola and food chain Mc Donalds.

On November 30 last year,  FIA’s Extraordinary General Assembly allowed electronic voting following a proposal by the World Council to make the process all-inclusive process.

This was implemented in December 2020 during the ordinary general assemblies, and certain mobility regions have since used LUMI for their own elections. The real test will, however, be in the FIA elections.

On December 3, the Senate approved the list of FIA members eligible to vote and published the list on the FIA website the following day.

These include all national sporting authorities of which the Kenya Motor Sport Federation is a member and will be represented by chairman Phineas Kimathi.

Each FIA member who attends the General Assembly on Friday in person will receive a LUMI keypad and a personalised voting card.

Once he of she has received a personal voting card, the member will no longer be authorised to vote remotely. 

“In other words, the provision of the voting card will automatically withdraw access to the LUMI platform that enables remote voting,” says the FIA.

Advance voting is, however, allowed and it opens Wednesday at 10am (12 noon Kenyan time) and closes Thursday at 1pm.

The FIA says an initial test on remote voting only was done on October 29, but in real world conditions (in-person and remote voting) is planned for today before the   General Assembly on Friday.

During the test, LUMI will give explanations on the functioning of the system on how a vote is registered. Each question also submitted to a vote will be open for a limited time that is announced in advance by LUMI.

Any vote cast during the time allowed will be registered, and the system will issue a confirmation of the registration of the vote.

During the time allowed for voting on a given question, each member will be able to correct his or her vote in case of an error. The vote that is definitively registered by the system will be the last vote cast at the time of closure of the vote.

May the Kenyans win.

njengap@gmail.com