Daily Times

LAHORE: The manual submission of results by presiding officers at the offices of the District Returning Officer (DRO) throughout the country continued throughout the night between Wednesday and Thursday, leaving presiding officers and many candidates for national and provincial assembly seats inconvenienced.

In Lahore, long queues could be seen well into the morning at around 11am as some presiding officers came to the DRO office, set up at the sessions court as late as 6am in the morning, 12 hours after the formal closure of the polling activity. The returning officers for the city’s 14 NA and 30 provincial assembly seats were also stationed at the DRO office to receive polling bags, as well as the results which could not be transmitted electronically due to the failure of the Results Transmission System (RTS) introduced by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).

Among candidates who spent the night at the DRO office were PML-N’s Saad Rafique (NA-131), Waheed Alam Khan (NA-125), Ramzan Siddique Bhatti (PP-166), Mian Marghob (PP-149), Rana Ahsan Sharafat (PP-158), and PTI’s Dr Murad Ras (PP-159).

Speaking to Daily Times, Rafique, who even took at a nap at a bench placed in the sessions court compound during the night, said, “I have never seen such a strange election in the history of Pakistan where submission of polling bags continues till the morning after the election day.”

According to the unofficial results available in the media in the evening on Thursaday, he had lost to PTI’s Imran Khan with a narrow margin of votes.

However, at the sessions court in the morning, Rafique said that he had been at the venue for the last 15 hours and there was still no information on the final vote count in his constituency.

“There were some 40 to 50 polling stations in my constituency where our polling agents were refused a copy of the result. When I got to know about that at around midnight, I rushed to the RO’s Office. I have been here for oevr 15 hours but still there is no information about the result,” he said, adding that Lahore was not a remote area so there was no excuse for the extended delay.

Rana Sharafat, who contested on the PML-N ticket against PTI’s Aleem Khan, told Daily Times that results from several polling stations in his constituency were allegedly rigged by security personnel in favour of his opponent. “The army officials remained very polite with our polling agents till 6pm, as soon as the polling ended and counting started, they changed their behaviour. I was told by my polling agents that army officials forcibly asked them to leave on gunpoint,” he said.

The presiding officers, meanwhile, complained about poor backup arrangements for transportation of results.

Sadaqat Ali, an administrative officer at Univeristy of Engineering and Technology (UET), performed duties as the presiding officer in Salamatpura polling station adjacent to the Pakistan Mint Factory in NA-128. While standing in the queue for submission of results and polling bags, he said he hadn’t slept for the last 36 hours. “There were many loopholes in the election procedure. We suffered a lot due to the failure of the RTS,” he said, adding that he made several attempts to transmit the result using the automated system but in vain. Later, he said, he received directions from the RO to submit results manually at the sessions courts. “It was my first election duty in my 13-year career, and now I have made up my mind to never perform any kind of election-related duties in the future,” he said.

Sheikh Muhammad Yousuf, who presided the process at a polling station in NA-131, said that the delay in arrival at the sessions court was due to the lack of a viable transportation plan. He said there was a dearth of transport facilities. “I completed my work by 11pm on Wednesday but I could not reach the RO’s office until the morning on Thursday. When we finished work, we were told by the security personnel that no transport was available to take us to the RO office,” he said.

Published in Daily Times, July 27^th 2018.