Re-election ordered in Saad Rafique’s constituency

LAHORE: An election tribunal on Monday, while sending PML-N Federal Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique home, declared the NA-125 polls null and void, ordering the ECP to hold a re-election in the constituency within 60 days.
The Faisalabad election tribunal judge, Javaid Rashid Mehboobi, who was camping in Lahore to hear the petition filed by PTI candidate Hamid Khan, passed the orders.The same tribunal also accepted the election petition filed by PTI candidate Hafiz Farhat Abbas against PML-N’s Mian Naseer Ahmed from PP-155, ordering re-polls.
The News has learnt that the tribunal issued the verdict after observing massive irregularities in the election record and process of both the constituencies. It was mandatory for the presiding officer of every polling station to place his signature and thumb impression on the proforma No XIV, which deals with the counting of votes, but more than half of the 265 polling stations had no thumb impressions and signatures of the officials concerned.
The returning officer for NA-125, Khalid Bhatti, compiled the result on the basis of a largenumber of unverified Performa No XIV.Moreover, the judge specifically mentioned in his verdict that the presiding officers and election staff did not work properly and irregularities and illegalities emerged in polling stations owing to their negligence.
The judge also directed the district returning officer to conduct an inquiry and take legal action against the returning officers, presiding officers and election staff of the two constituencies. Moreover, the irregularities were found in seven polling stations including 5, 6, 107, 110, 111, 120 and 98.
The tribunal had compiled a report on 10 polling stations, which were chosen earlier, after inspection and verification.As per sources in the tribunal, the Performa No XIV was found only in two of these polling stations, while it was missing in the remaining eight. Also, polling bags were found unsealed and without counterfoils.
Saad had bagged 123,416 votes from the constituency beating Hamid who secured 84,495 votes.During the course of proceedings of both petitions, the proceedings were transferred to Faisalabad from Lahore when Hamid had expressed distrust over the member of the tribunal, Kazim Malik, in the provincial capital.
Earlier in December 2014, a retired sessions judge and the chairman of the National Forensic Science Agency (NFSA) had submitted their reports to the tribunal after inspecting the election material, raising serious questions about it. They had detected several discrepancies, including duplicate votes and invalid national identity cards used for voting at five polling stations.Before that, a commission, appointed in October 2014 to examine polling bags and other record, had also found several irregularities.