Three down…

Yet again, there is revealed catalogue of chronic, endemic incompetence and mismanagement - ECP needs to carry the can

It is difficult to avoid cliched cricketing metaphors — but the PTI is having a good innings in its match against the PML-N. For the second time in a week, an election tribunal has unseated and disqualified an elected lawmaker, ruling that his election was invalid. Siddiq Khan Baloch had supposedly won NA-154, Lodhran, from Jehangir Tareen of the PTI. The election tribunal decided differently and he has been disqualified for life, with his academic credentials found to be fake on top of a host of irregularities surrounding his election. There is to be a re-election. There can be no complaints that the election tribunal had been anything less than thorough — it had met 131 times since August 15, 2013. That said, two years is too long to reach a verdict such as this.

What the electoral tribunal has found is much the same as it found in the other two cases that have gone in favour of the PTI. There were massive irregularities, the semantics of which will be endlessly analysed for evidence of organised rigging.

An investigation by NADRA revealed that there were 20,601 invalid CNICs or votes cast without a supporting identity card, 121 voters were not registered in the constituency, 728 duplicate votes were cast and there were 587 without a thumbprint. In all, more than enough to disqualify the candidate, who is personally unlikely to be responsible for any of this catalogue of failure.

The 122,133 votes that could not be verified because of blurred thumbprints are by themselves sufficient to render the election invalid — and as in the previous two cases, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is the loser. The disqualified candidate was in no mood to accept the finding of the election tribunal and grumbled that the problem lay with the ECP rather than with him, carefully avoiding the fact of his faked academic qualifications, which is also in itself sufficient to see him unseated. Yet again, there is revealed a catalogue of chronic and endemic incompetence and mismanagement — and yes, the ECP needs to carry the can. Next man to the wicket, please.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th,  2015.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.