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Friday April 26, 2024

Did PTI chairman get 11,000 invalid votes?

ISLAMABAD: The misconception created by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) over National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) votes’ audit report regarding NA-122 also implicates its leader Imran Khan of getting “bogus” votes during the general election 2013.Nadra’s report regarding Na-122 says that the authority could verify only 73478 votes while 93852 votes

By our correspondents
May 13, 2015
ISLAMABAD: The misconception created by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) over National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) votes’ audit report regarding NA-122 also implicates its leader Imran Khan of getting “bogus” votes during the general election 2013.
Nadra’s report regarding Na-122 says that the authority could verify only 73478 votes while 93852 votes could not be verified though they had valid computerised identity cards. Ever since the release of the NA-122 report, the PTI leaders have been saying on media that only 73478 votes in NA-122 were valid while 93852 were invalid.
The PTI leaders do not know one key fact that by this logic, their Chairman Imran Khan, who secured 84517 in 2013 election also got 11000 invalid votes (if their logic of terming unverified votes as invalid is accepted) as only 73478 votes could be verified by Nadra and PTI chairman obtained 11000 more votes than those verified by Nadra.
Nadra has mentioned that it could not verify 93852 votes because of poor quality of thumb impressions while the CNICs written against the said votes were valid.
Well-placed sources in Nadra told The News that Nadra received 170 postal ballots of which, most of the votes were cast in favour of Imran Khan while only 27 were cast for Sardar Ayaz Sadiq but during the verification process, the votes had valid CNICs but the thumb impressions could not be verified because of poor quality. The sources said that at polling stations where Imran has won, there were more instances of invalid CNICs mentioned against ballots. The sources maintained that the issue of invalid CNICs, i.e. 6123 as pointed out by Nadra report, is also of human error as a minute mistake in 13-digit CNIC could make it invalid and on most of the occasions it appears that the Assistant Presiding Officer had mistakenly interchanged the digits.
The sources said that Nadra scans the thumb impressions through its Automated Fingerprint Identification System which rejects every thumb impression with poor quality however, if the same verification is done manually, more than 99% of the unverified votes could be verified but the process will take months.
The sources said that the science of thumb impression verification was over a century old and any thumb impression with poor quality could be matched using simple tools of forensic science but it takes a lot of time to verify one impress whereas in the Election Tribunal there is only one month to verify around two hundred thousand thumb impressions which could only be done through the automated system.
The sources added that Nadra is responsible for each and every word written in its report and the 93852 votes which could not be verified but have valid CNICs, the validity of CNICs could be checked by the Election Tribunal or the candidates by simply sending a text message of the CNIC number at 8800.