The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) disregarded the advice of the Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan and decided against employing technological innovations, using the excuse of time constraints and what not. The position it took literally amounted to saying that there isn’t enough time for the reforms suggested by the SC, so might as well allow whatever cheating and corruption can take place this time, but we’ll try and do better in the next election. That is unfortunate, not the least since that is precisely what seems to have happened during the vote. Surely this situation calls for a little looking into. The apex court’s short order clearly said that it was the election commission’s responsibility to “ensure that the election is conducted honestly, justly, fairly, and in accordance with law and that corrupt practices are guarded against.” Now who is going to answer for the fact that the manner in which ECP conducted the election allowed corrupt practices, since there was very clearly a mysterious pattern of voting, which means that it wasn’t able to discharge its duties honestly, justly for fairly? And it says a lot that the head of the three-member committee that ECP has constituted to give recommendations about use of technology in future Senate elections is going to retire in a matter of weeks. That of course means that pretty soon the committee will stand dissolved and then the entire initiative will be lost in bureaucratic hurdles. It is somewhat startling that incidents that have already become cause for national embarrassment, like the video of Yousaf Gilani’s teaching voters how to waste their votes, did not force ECP to become more proactive, even though the ministry of science and technology assured it that there was enough time to make necessary arrangements. Hopefully the honourable court will now investigate ECP’s lack of compliance and determine whether it was a matter of there being no way to do what was necessary in the given timeframe or if it was a matter of lack of requisite will, as many are forced to suspect. As things stand, Yousaf Gilani has won the Senate election but the matter of his son’s leaked video remains unaddressed. That no doubt gives rise to the obvious questions of ECP’s own response to the matter. Considering that it moved with lightning speed to address the controversy raised by the Daska by-election, there is a serious need to investigate its silence over all the problems that preceded the Senate election. *