impression verification after parties demand for it, but in none of the case these were considered as “evidence”.
Tribunals held that if rigging took place on poling day, there must be some evidence to this fact from the proceedings of that day. Not only this, the Supreme Court on March 25 held, while rejecting a petition, that Nadra could be ordered for thumb impression verification only if there is already some evidence of rigging from the happenings of polling process.
Nadra has officially stated more than once that manually captured impressions on paper cannot be verified from the digitally captured thumb impressions saved in Nadra record in all the cases.
Thus Nadra reports which were simply ignored by the tribunals were never considered as evidence. Experts say that Nadra verifications were an afterthought of losing parties only after knowing that verification process is impossible. They say that on election-day, no specific rigging pattern were explained while levelling rigging allegations by the losing parties, and they were only unhappy because of their defeat and were doubting as if they were defeated through some rigging. ECP officials say that now these parties are simply trying to exploit Nadra’s inability to verify all thumb impressions and want to destabilise whole system.
When The News contacted witnesses mentioned by PTI, including senior Journalist Hamid Mir, they said that they were never approached by anyone to appear as witness.
The PTI white paper also comprised of simple statements of unknown individuals stating that they witness rigging on polling day. This obviously could not be considered as evidence if the same was not “reported” on the polling day. These statements only came on record after about six months of election-day only at the time of publishing of PTI’s white paper. Some other points highlighted in PTI’s white paper were some typographical mistakes which were corrected accordingly.
The election results are written manually and in case of around 70,000 polling stations there can be great chances of calculation mistakes or writing errors, but even such errors were found in negligible number of cases having no impact on results.
There might have been some rigging as claimed by some parties but as a matter of fact, no party, including PTI, has so far been succeeded to submit any single credible evidence to this effect.