Pakistan’s election commission’s much-touted new app which was supposed to help officials to quickly tabulate and transmit election results faced significant challenges on Friday as the authorities were moving at a snail’s pace to announce the result of the election amid allegations of rigging.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) prepared the Election Management System (EMS) app for transmission of results from each polling station to a centralised system where tabulation of all results would be completed by the Returning Offices, who are in charge of preparing and releasing the result of each constituency.
However, the top electoral body’s claim that it would ensure the timely announcement of results without depending on the Internet fell flat on its face when the absence of connectivity brought forth a set of unexpected yet familiar challenges, mainly for Presiding Officers at a number of polling stations on Thursday, who found themselves unable to transmit the final results of their respective stations using the homegrown system, the Dawn reported.
As a result, there has been an unusual delay in declaring the election results to the National Assembly and four provincial assemblies.
During the previous elections in 2018, the ECP’s Result Transmission System (RTS) was clogged when thousands of polling stations began sending results from all parts of the country, causing delays in the announcement of results of some constituencies, which was exploited by the losing parties as an alleged conscious effort to rig the results.
On Thursday evening, the ECP back-tracked from its claim of announcing the poll results on time when one of its officials said that the presiding officers would now “physically” send the results of their polling stations to the offices of their respective returning officers, where they would be transmitted via the system “once internet service is restored”, the report said.
The CEC was expected to address a press conference, but instead, special secretary Zafar Iqbal appeared on state-run PTV just before 3 am (local time) on Friday to announce the first official results from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly. In the brief announcement, he squarely blamed the suspension of Internet and mobile phone services for the delay.
The ECP had claimed that the countrywide test run of EMS had been a “success”.
ECP secretary Syed Asif Hussain had ruled out any possibility of manipulation at a press conference last week. He said the EMS would work even if the Internet failed. He said more than 60 ROs in remote areas had also been provided with satellite connectivity to keep them connected.
