Govt vs NADRA

NADRA sticks to its stance that the Result Transmission System (RTS) had not collapsed on the election day, and that raises questions as to what had caused the relevant authorities to dump the mobile phone application meant to transmit poll results to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and go ahead with the manual ways of counting the ballots. The general election results are, therefore, in doubt — well, not for the first time — and with that the mandate of the PTI government too. NADRA, the creator of the mobile app, is ready for a forensic audit of its claim. The claim counters the ECP whose secretary, Babar Yaqoob, is on record to have told the nation a couple of hours past the July 25 midnight that the ‘collapse’ of the RTS had caused delays in announcement of poll results.

Apparently a NADRA-ECP dispute, the RTS ‘failure’ controversy has rather pitched NADRA and the PTI government against each other. It’s because Senator Azam Swati of the PTI, who leads a parliamentary probe into the matter, believes that top NADRA officials were involved in ‘twisting the system’ and that ‘the flow of the results was deliberately delayed’. While announcing that the federal government will conduct an inquiry into the alleged manipulation of election results, Swati says that an independent forensic audit is not possible unless a few key officials of NADRA, including its Chairman Usman Yousuf Mobin, are ‘temporarily replaced’ because they can obstruct access to relevant data.

While the announcement of an election probe is a welcome step, the PTI government will have to ensure that it is genuinely independent. As of now, the PTI demand for sidelining top NADRA officials for the period of the probe appears to be aimed at achieving a result that does not dispute the outcome of the general election — obviously for being its beneficiary — rather than a way of satisfying the principle of fairness.

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

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