Electoral reforms to take care of 90pc of ECP lapses

ISLAMABAD: At least 90% of the lapses and shortcomings of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), pinpointed in the report of the judicial commission, which inquired into the charges of rigging in the 2013 general elections and dismissed them, will go away after the impending electoral reforms.
“The reforms, to be approved by the parliament, will take care of all the flaws listed by the commission,” an ECP official told The News.Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has threatened to be on streets once again if the ECP did not give a satisfactory answer to his 40-point letter that he wrote after the findings of the commission were released.
“Not only Imran Khan but everyone who has taken exception to the performance and role of the ECP in the light of the commission’s report will be satisfied after the parliamentary passage of the reforms,” the official said.
He said that the findings of the commission have provided guidelines to the bipartisan parliamentary committee on the reforms to remove every objection and reservations, identified in the report.
The official said that the ECP continues to give its output to the government to improve the electoral system with the objective of stopping any kind of complaints and grievances by political parties in future.
He said that had the reforms been introduced earlier before the last general elections as repeatedly urged by the ECP, most of the lapses and shortcomings, listed in the commission’s report, would not have arisen. He said it was not in the ECP’s power to make laws, and legislation was to be brought by the parliament.
The official said that the ECP worked within the parameters and purview of the prevailing laws that governed it and the electoral process. They were followed, he said.The commission’s findings recognised at least nine major flaws in the planning and execution of the polls by the ECP and the electoral body’s 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.