Daily Times

KASUR: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Monday issued an order for the third time to recount votes in NA-140, constituency of Kasur IV, where Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf candidate Sardar Talib Hassan Nakai secured 124,621 votes with a winning margin of 236 votes.

His opponent, Pakistan Muslim League -Nawaz (PML-N) candidate Rana Muhammad Hayat Khan got 124,385 votes.

Hayat requested for a recounting of votes, but his appeal was rejected by the returning officer (RO) Samia Amjad.

Later, he approached the Election Commission of Pakistan in Islamabad for a recounting request, which in turn ordered the RO to recount the votes in NA-140.

The RO responded that the consolidation of the results had been done, and the recounting could not be done after the consolidation process.

Consequently, the Election Commission of Pakistan issued a notification of cancellation of Hayat’s request.

The ‘enraged’ Hayat staged a demonstration in front of tehsil court in Pattoki, and criticised the Election Commission of Pakistan and RO.

He said that the RO could not consolidate the results until the rejected votes were not counted in front of both contestants, and that the rejected number of votes was 7,453.

In NA-140, 281,891 votes were casted excluding the rejected votes, whereas the winning margin has been recorded as 0.0000008%, which is far less than the recounting threshold, five percent, issued by the ECP.

Meanwhile, the ECP, once again, issued a vote recounting notification on July 30.

The date and timing of recounting will be announced by the RO.

The ECP can order a recount before the completion of consolidation process, which means before the postal ballots have been counted and Form 49s have been filled out.

It should be noted that the consolidation process has to be completed within five days of the election. After the consolidation is complete, the RO must provide signed copies of consolidated results (Form 49) to the ECP within 24 hours.

Published in Daily Times, July 31^st 2018.