Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on Wednesday rejected the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP)’s claim that the voting process was above suspicion and that the people exercised their right to vote in a free environment without any complaints.

“Hollow claims and even more hollow explanations are worse than the flawed voting exercise,” said PPP Secretary General Farhatullah Babar in a statement.

“The claim that ECP ensured swift access of people to all electoral process was belied by the breakdown of result transmission system (RTS) on the one hand and inexplicable delay in transmission of results physically on the other,” he said.

He continued: “Manipulation in the past was believed to have taken place at the time of consolidation of results in the offices of returning officers. To minimise the role of ROs this year, the RTS was introduced for the first time so that polling officers could directly transmit results to the ECP. However, the RTS worked for some time on July 25 after the end of polling time until a sudden announcement said that it had collapsed and polling officers were asked to submit results to ROs, ergo reviving the controversial role of ROs that had always been mired in the past.”

He asked why no instant revival system or back up mechanism was put in place?

“If the collapse claim was false who decided to make the RTS dysfunctional through fake announcement and for what purpose?”

Formerly a senator, Babar said that the National Database and Registration Authority

(NADRA) had designed special transmission system for banks, passport offices and money transaction services both nationally and internationally and none of them failed ever. “Why this particular transmission system devised by it failed irreversibly, he asked, adding that “answers to these questions would make all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place”.

The PPP leader went on to say that the claim that “national and international observers had endorsed fairness of the polls and that polling stations were not taken over by state agencies was not the whole truth”.

“Firstly, far from giving a clean chit the observers had expressed serious concerns over reshaping of the political environment ahead of the polls and secondly, if indeed the result transmission system was deliberately made dysfunctional, there was no need for direct takeover of polling stations by the state agencies,” he added.

Published in Daily Times, August  2^nd 2018.