For a transparent process

More than a week after the elections, there is still no clarity about the events that transpired on the night of July 25. Every political party, except for the PTI, has raised the issue of the polling process being tampered with on Election Day. The Election Commission of Pakistan missed its own 2am deadline for announcing the final results of the elections by over 24 hours. There have now been media reports that the ECP’s claim of technical problems with the Results Transmission Service has been contradicted by officials at Nadra. According to these reports, there were no issues with the RTS system from Nadra’s end but that the authority received a call from the ECP claiming it wasn’t working. This led to a halt in the announcement of vote totals and a breakdown of the procedures for vote tallying that had been set before the elections. At the very least, one would expect the ECP to promise a full review of any mistakes that may have been made, and which may have then led to such speculations. Instead, in an extraordinarily combative press conference on Tuesday, ECP Secretary Babar Yaqoob rejected calls for the chief election commissioner to stand down and turned his guns on everyone who has doubted the fairness of the elections by accusing them of violating the basic principles of democracy and disrespecting the mandate of the people.

This is not the right tack for the ECP to take. Demanding a proper investigation to ensure that all votes were fairly counted is the democratic right of every citizen and every political party. Asking for an explanation for the peculiar delay in announcing the election results is equally valid. The ECP secretary has also chosen to point to international observers’ statements as evidence that the elections were conducted without any controversy. However, we must not fail to point out that most monitoring teams have pointed to the large number of discarded votes – which in some cases where greater than the margin of victory – and the fact that polling agents of some political parties were not allowed to observe the count. To ensure that the polling process in Election 2018 is seen as fair and free, the ECP needs to assuage fears by ordering an independent technical audit of the RTS system. The point of using this technology was to prevent any possibility of returning officers being coerced into manipulating results. Its alleged technical problems, however, put a spanner in the works as far the process went. It is vital we know if the RTS system truly did collapse so that all parties get an honest answer regarding what happened on the night of the elections.