Complaints about delimitation of constituencies can be filed by April 3

PESHAWAR: Any voter can file a complaint about the preliminary delimitation of electoral constituencies till April 3 with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), said an official on Tuesday.

Spokesman for the Provincial Election Commission, Sohail Khan told The News that complaints could be filed in the office of the ECP secretary along with all relevant documents. He said the details of the preliminary delimitation of electoral constituencies were available in every ECP district office. It may be mentioned here that the ECP notified new delimitations on Monday. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa got four more National Assembly seats as per preliminary delimitation of electoral constituencies. The number of National Assembly seats from the province increased from 35 to 39.

As per the list, Peshawar district got one more National Assembly seat. It now has five seats. The Lower Dir district also got another National Assembly seat. It now has two National Assembly seats.

The Swat district also got another National Assembly seat to raise its total to three.

According to the preliminary delimitation, Tank district got a separate National Assembly seat. Earlier, Dera Ismail Khan and Tank districts had a combined National Assembly seat.

On the other hand, the National Assembly seats count will now start from Chitral instead of Peshawar. The NA-1 seat will go to Chitral, which has a population of 4,47,362. So it will be NA-1 Chitral now instead of NA-1 Peshawar. The number of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly seats would remain the same.

However, as per the population formula, Peshawar district would get three more provincial assembly seats as its total number of seats increased from 11 to 14. Chitral, Swabi and Charsadda districts have lost one seat each.

Sohail Khan, the provincial Election Commission spokesman, said that drastic changes were made in the constituencies following the increase of three constituencies in Peshawar.

However, the people did not know about the changes in the names and delimitation in the constituencies and were still confused.

The Mardan district constituencies now start from PK-48 Mardan-1 from which Katlang tehsil comprising the areas of Katlang and Jamal Garhi has been excluded and included in PK-49 Mardan-II with Sawaldher village. Rustum tehsil of Mardan district comprising areas of Gujarat and Garyala have been excluded from PK-49.

PK-1 would start from Chitral while the last provincial assembly seat is PK-99 Dera Ismail Khan-V.

On December 22 last year, President Mamnoon Hussain had approved the 24th Constitutional Amendment Bill 2017, passing it into law.

On December 19, the Senate approved the Constitution (Amendment) Bill, 2017 with 84 votes in favour of the bill and one vote against it. The National Assembly had passed the bill last month.

The law seeks to carry out fresh delimitation of constituencies on the basis of officially published census results, but will not change the 272 seats strength of the National Assembly.