KARACHI: The Pakistan Peo­ple’s Party (PPP), which took no time to reject the results of October 17 re-election for PS-11 Larkana-II constituency, approa­ched the Election Commission of Pakistan on Friday with details of its grievances and blamed deployment of security personnel as one of the reasons behind the “rigged” elections.

In a letter to the ECP chief, Taj Haider, who is also in charge of the party’s election cell, came up with arguments which mostly related to the vote-count process and the situation that ensued.

The letter demanded “justice” and asked for action against those elements that defied the rules prescribed by the ECP.

“All political parties except the ones in Federal Government have demanded that army personnel should not be posted inside or outside the polling stations,” said the letter. “Yet it was done and the consequences are the same as the ones obtained in the highly rigged and disputed general elections 2018. The federal government by using the armed forces in a domain that is purely a civilian domain is trying to politicise the armed forces. They are doing this at a time when our forces are facing serious internal and external challenges.”

The PPP leader said in his letter that at the end of the polling, security personnel pushed out PPP candidate’s polling agents by force and events after that further complicated the situation and made the whole process dubious.

“Correctness of result of count (Form-45) is the essence of fair elections. The use of force to prevent the agents of candidates from witnessing the counting process, to sign the Forms-45 and obtain copies of the same duly signed by the respective presiding officers have made yesterday’s by-election a farce to say the least,” said the letter.

According to the letter, Section 90 of the Election Act 2017 makes the entire proceedings at the close of polls very explicit and transparent. Sub-sections 90(12) and 90(13) make it mandatory on the presiding officer to conduct counting in the presence of polling agents and to hand over to them signed copies of the results of polls.

“Instead the candidate and the polling agents who were thrown out of polling stations had to wait for hours outside the office of DRO to receive forged copies of Form-45 in the end,” added the PPP letter to the ECP chief.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2019