Daily Times

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Thursday directed the Cabinet Division to form an inquiry committee to investigate the causes of alleged failure of the Result transmission System (RTS) during July 25 general elections.

Sources said that the committee would comprise technical experts from National Telecom and Information Technology Security Board (NTISB) and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). According to a letter written to the Cabinet Division secretary, the committee has been asked to analyse the RTS project, its preparation and finalisation by National Database Regulatory Authority (NADRA), the quality and extent of training imparted to its users, the train of events taking place on the night of July 25 and thereafter, fix responsibility and make recommendations for future, according to the terms of reference decided by the commission.

The committee has been further asked in the letter to complete the inquiry within a month.

The controversy around the RTS, a mobile application created by NADRA and employed by the ECP to relay results from polling stations to the commission, had begun when ECP secretary claimed late into July 25 that the system had “malfunctioned”.

Since then, political parties, including the PPP and the PML-N, have demanded a parliamentary commission into the matter while NADRA officials have denied that the RTS crashed on election eve. They instead went on to claim that it could have been the commission’s Result Management System (RMS) that might have crashed, adding that NADRA received results from around 50 percent of polling stations before the “commission directed its officers to stop using RTS”.

Published in Daily Times, August 3^rd 2018.