The RTS was designed for presiding officers to upload the picture of Form 45 — a document that carries data of all contesting candidates in a constituency along with the number of votes they secured — through their mobile devices and transmit the same to the ECP server in real time. According to the RTS data submitted to the investigation committee, the application received Forms 45 from 225 polling stations in the first hour after the polling ended at 6pm on July 25. The traffic recorded by the application at 11pm (July 25) was 15,796, but in the next seven hours i.e. at 6am (July 26), the traffic was cut down to 1,007 polling stations. And then there was a gradual drop in the data transmitted.
What caused this drop — a system failure, any wrongdoing or anything else — is the subject of the investigation led by Senator Swati. NADRA’s stance has been the same since the day the controversy erupted. When ECP Secretary Babar Yaqoob appeared on TV screens well after midnight just to inform the nation that the RTS had ‘collapsed’, the database authority did not take much time to contradict the ‘wrong announcement’. How the ECP now counters the NADRA claim before the investigation panel remains to be seen.
While the idea behind introducing the RTS was to bring transparency to the polling day exercise, it has instead raised questions on the credibility of the elections. Question mark also hangs on whether the investigation led by a member of the PTI — a party that stands to benefit from the elections — will bring to fore the real hows and whys of the RTS ‘failure’. An independent inquiry may still be needed.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 27th, 2018.
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