The accused who voted 44 times has been identified as Muhammad Arif Saller, who had cast these votes at polling station No 54 of the Sindh Assembly constituency PS-114. PHOTO: EXPRESS/FILE
For the first time in the country’s electoral history, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has decided to penalise those who voted multiple times in the 2013 general elections.
The ECP decided that it will take action under the Representation of Peoples Act (RPA), 1976 against voters who cast ballots multiple times on the basis of reports from the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), ECP’s Director General (Elections) Sher Afgan told reporters after a commission meeting on Monday. “The commission will determine the cases of impersonation, which come under corrupt practices,” he explained.
Under the RPA, anyone found involved in corrupt practices during an election can face up to three years in jail or a fine of Rs5,000 or both. However, there is no proportionality regarding the severity of the prescribed penalty as three years of imprisonment is far greater than only a meagre fine of Rs5,000.
Soon after the elections, the commission had set up 14 tribunals to take up complaints of anomalies. These post-election tribunals, comprising retired high court judges, sent around three dozen cases to NADRA to verify the authenticity of voters out of 400 rigging complaints.
NADRA used its Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) to establish the authenticity by conducting a forensic analysis of election material. During the analysis, it discovered that in some constituencies, one voter had voted a dozen times, while there was one case where a voter had cast as many as 44 votes.
Even though the commission decided to take action against impersonating voters, it did not touch the issue of corrupt polling staff.
During forensic analyses, thousands of voters could not be verified due to what NADRA called ‘bad thumb impressions’ that were not verifiable. However, it has revealed the names of those who could be verified. One of them was Waseem Anwar Hussain who polled 35 votes at polling station No 34 in NA-256 where Mutahidda Quami Movement’s Iqbal Muhammad Khan had won, bagging 151,788 votes. Another voter, Shakir Zaheer, had cast seven votes at polling station No 168 in the same constituency. Also in the same constituency, Muhammad Faizanuddin had cast eight votes.
The trend is not limited to Karachi or to a particular party.
In NA-202 (Shikarpur), a woman named Hajra, cast four votes. Muhammad Ibrahim Jatoi of the National Peoples Party had won from the constituency, securing as many as 54,890 votes.
The accused who voted 44 times has been identified as Muhammad Arif Saller, who had cast these votes at polling station No 54 of the Sindh Assembly constituency PS-114, where Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) Irfanullah Khan Marwat was declared winner.
Similarly, in NA-258, where PML-N’s Hakeem Khan Baloch won the elections, Muhammad Sohaim had polled eight votes at polling station No 229.
Finance ministry demand return of election money
The ECP and the Ministry of Finance are, meanwhile, at loggerheads over Rs3.5 billion that had been released to the commission for holding the local bodies’ elections last year.
Since the LG polls were delayed, the finance ministry wrote to the ECP asking it to return the amount. The commission wrote back, saying that it has to make payments of Rs331 million to the army and Rs45 million to NADRA for their services during last year’s polls. Moreover, the commission said it spent an additional Rs180 million during the re-verification of Karachi’s voters’ list.
However, the finance ministry has asked the commission to surrender the amount it was allocated for the LG polls and make a fresh separate demand for the supplementary grant to clear its dues.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 20th, 2014.
COMMENTS (6)
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@ Mirza NA-256 Karachi, PTI's Zubair Khan was runners up.
How is PTI or IK has suffered from the above bogus voting? In most of these cases it was PPP which lost the close election not PTI. How can we change our national character for being unfair and crooks?
Sorry but too little too late. The current ecp setup is unable to functionindependently and should be disband immediately. All those responsible for conducting this rigged election need to be tried and punished severely. Imagine billions of tax payers money wasted in 2013 on an absolutely useless exercise.
Even if this is late, it is the right and fair thing to do. We are evolving, by fits and starts, some steps forward, some backwards, whatever we call democracy and the election mess was very much part of that in our socio-political context.
The penalties should be harsh and strongly deterrent and the wildly thoughtless courts should help, rather than hinder these penalties becoming truly effective.
And are you going to tell me this was not because of the efforts of one Imran Khan? Is this not absolutely essential before the next elections? Electoral reforms are critical, critical, to any democracy, and here we give them the least importance. . For the next five years, ECP should be completely reformed, revamped, it should hold mock elections to get it systems updated and tested, it should have complete autonomy on the running of elections, it should hold Local Body elections on the same pattern as it would want to hold the general elections. . If ECP is not revamped, and accountability is not done on the May 2013 elections, we will be stuck in the same cycle as India was from 47 to 1990 until they introduced electoral reforms.
Too little too late. ECP members should have resigned just like their chairman for failing to conduct free and fair elections and losing the confidence of the public.