Islamabad, September 20,’24. The Election Commission of Pakistan through its Office Order of 4th September 2024, nearly seven months after the controversial conduct of the General Election 2024, constituted 38 teams of its staff to ensure that the forms of the Election’s results are uploaded on its website and prepare details of missing and unreadable forms. The team was given seven (7) days to complete the tasks, but despite the passage of fifteen (15) days, the ECP has yet to make any work details public.
PATTAN Coalition-38 – a network of more than 250 associations, CBOs, labour unions – has voiced its concern when the ECP surreptitiously formed its verification committees without following law and prescribed procedures, especially at the time when more than 300 election petitions are pending adjudications in Election Tribunals.
Earlier, PATTAN Coalition-38 made public the key findings of its audits of the election results of several dozen constituencies which have revealed cases of massive rigging, forgeries, manipulation and missing data.
One of the constituencies examined earlier was NA-265 from Pishin (Balochistan) where the entire election data of national votes in ninety (90) shared polling stations with the connected provincial constituency PB-48 was missing from the ECP’s website, and which has now been added and provided an opportunity to closely re-examine the data. We found out that 12,194 fewer polled votes for NA-265 were recorded when compared with the issued ballot papers. A significantly large number of 4,461 votes were rejected. Overall, 14,223 fewer votes are recorded than the number of issued ballot papers for NA-265 (12% of polled votes). This gross inconsistency begs questions about the fairness of election results when stacked together with the margin of victory of 20,992 votes for the returning candidates of NA-265, Molana Fazal ur Rehman.
The poor performance of the task-committees is manifested in our audits of NA-265 election results where 268 of 312 Form-45 are still incomplete or lacking mentions of vital information – 12% do not report gender-disaggregated votes, 49% without registered voters, 26% do not mention the presiding officer’s (PO) posting place, 52% and 61% missed date-time and place of the Form-45’s preparations, 42% without the signatures of polling agents, and 14% to 17% without the signatures, CNIC numbers and thumb impressions of the respective POS, etc. Furthermore, Form-45 of 2 polling stations and Form-46 of 122 polling stations are still missing from the ECP website. The sum of polled votes listed in Form-45 and Form-48 differ by hundreds. Likewise, it is also inconceivable how the ECP-appointed committee would have settled the odd task that the names of the presiding officers on Form-45 of provincial and national seats in 4 polling stations are different. The election data of three provincial assemblies also suffer from similar irregularities.
PATTAN-Coalition38 have been demanding since 8th February that a thorough audit of all the election results must be carried out transparently by a third party to identify the election frauds and the culprits are held accountable under the law. The ECP, instead of acting according to the law and prescribed procedures, appears to have taken this suspicious act to hide election irregularities and rigging. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon the ECP to publically declare the details of work done by its 38 committees in compliance with the assigned terms of reference.
