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ECP comes out with a set of recommendations to ensure that electoral exercises in future are comparatively freer

Based on its experiences of electoral exercise it conducted in 2018, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has come out with a set of recommendations to ensure that similar exercises in future are comparatively freer, more transparent and less cumbersome. Most of these recommendations call for changes to the legal frameworks designed to regulate elections. While avoiding to mention its own shortcomings or failures in managing the last elections, the Commission, however, makes some convincing observations and suggestions in its report on 2018 elections which was released in Islamabad on Monday.

The election exercise is essentially based on the census and delimitation of constituencies on the basis of census data. If there are political and administrative manipulations in these two essential components of the electoral process, it is bound to leave a question mark on the credibility of the elections. It is anybody’s guess how fair and transparent census and delimitation exercises had been in this country. Mindful of the discrepancies and flaws in maps provided by the revenue department and local administration for the demarcation of constituencies, the ECP has suggested amendments to Article 51 of the Constitution to ensure that the delimitation is carried out not later than one year before the completion of the term of a respective assembly. It has also suggested changes and modifications in some clauses of the Election Act 2017, apparently to make it more pragmatic.

The report, however, tries to evade the truth about the issues relating to Result Transmission System (RTS) which had generated a lot of controversy about the integrity, counting, tabulation and consolidation of results. The ECP had initially taken the stance that the RTS, a software developed by NADRA, collapsed. But there is credible evidence, based on media investigations, to suggest that returning officers, for whatever compulsions, were directed to not use the RTS for counting or transmitting the consolidated results. And what is more important, the ECP has called for immediate publication of the official census reports to enable it to carry out the delimitation for upcoming local bodies’ elections in all the four provinces.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 25^th, 2019.

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