non-compliance with the laws.
The 237-page report discussed in detail the ECP role in conducting the previous elections and raised serious questions about the ECP performance in planning and executing the polls.
The polls were not a snap election, the findings said. There was a plenty of time for the ECP to organise the elections which, during its five-year tenure, is the single most important task which it must prepare for andundertake. It had ample experience of past elections. The evidence, however, before the inquiry commission has suggested poor planning on the part of the ECP, the report said.
It particularly mentioned nine examples of poor planning by ECP for polls including lack of a formula for determining excess ballots; the decision to rely on only four printing presses; belated shifting of ballot papers from one press to other; failure to develop effective voter verification method; failure to establish and use an effective results management system; late provision of election material to some polling stations; and lack of its own storage space.
The report said the formula for determining excess ballots i.e. rounding up on the basis of polling stations was not adequately communicated to the returning officers (ROs), particularly in the Punjab. Even otherwise the method of calculating the number of excess ballots was not uniform throughout Pakistan. For example, in three out of the four provinces (Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) the provincial election commissions (PECs), which had received a copy of the action plan of the 2013 elections, decided on the number of ballots to be printed against no discernible formula despite the formula to be followed being set out in the action plan.
In the Punjab, the determination was left to the ROs who seemed to have received very little, if any, guidance on this point and as such the number of excess ballots requested per constituency varied greatly.
According to the report, even where the PECs decided the number of ballots there was little uniformity and it is unclear whether rounding up on a polling station-wise basis as per the instructions contained in the action plan were complied with.
The commission said the decision to rely on only 4 printing presses was fraught with danger especially due to the lack of capacity of the Lahore Printing Press. It was also known that the Printing Corporation of Pakistan had no automated system for numbering which had to be done manually and therefore extra personnel would most likely be needed for this purpose. An extra press such as the postal foundation should have been contracted from the start and a sufficient no of personnel for manual numbering and binding should have been hired by the start of printing, it said.