An act awaiting clean-up

The ECP blew their chance to shine on the night of the election

There was a golden opportunity for the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to shine on the night of the election — and they blew it. All was going well until 11.47pm on July the 25^th. Results were coming into the new Results Transmission System (RTS) apparently with no problem and suddenly they stopped. There was no apparent glitch in the (previously untried) system but the ECP announced after midnight that the RTS system had ‘collapsed’ and results were to be transmitted through the traditional manual system. If ever there was a recipe for the conspiracy theorists to bake in double-quick time this was it. Confusion reigned immediately and the Returning Officers (ROs) scrambled to bring the manual system, cumbersome and itself riddled with anomalies and opportunities for delay and misunderstanding, into action.

The consequences are plain to see. There were inordinate delays, allegations of rigging and a lack of transparency flew in all directions and the ECP managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It now transpires that the RTS had not ‘crashed’ and NADRA, creators of the mobile app are now known to have protested to the ECP at the time that it was still running fine and what was the ECP doing? They have been able to produce the data that shows the system working normally to back their case but they have held their fire as ‘it was not in the national interest’ to make a fuss.

On the contrary it is very much in the national interest and the ECP needs to be asked some very pointy questions. An effective piece of new technology was doing its job and got stopped dead in its tracks for reasons yet unknown, sowing confusion everywhere in the process and creating a climate of suspicion that persists even now. Two systems were in play on the night — NADRA using the RTS and the ECP using its own Result Management System (RMS). The two were not integrated. Therein probably lies the reason for this monumental cock-up, not a grand conspiracy at all just paper-based entities falling down in an electronic world.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 3^rd, 2018.

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