- RTS apparently the chief culprit in 2018 polls controversy
The tumult and shouting surrounding the gruelling election campaign of ‘pathfinder’ 2018 general elections has since died down–sort of—but the usual strident post-poll clamour regarding alleged rigging, cheating and sundry unfair practices is now at its zenith, with five political parties pointing accusatory fingers at the Election Commission of Pakistan and its usual suspects, the returning officers and polling booth staff. This may largely be attributed to the sore loser’s wounded vanity or ingrained knee-jerk reaction, as resorting to foul play on a massive scale is well-nigh impossible under the hawk-like gaze of 53,000 monitors and observers, including trained, highly professional international ‘invigilators’, 60-100 from EU and 400 from other countries. There were indeed numerous allegations of polling agents being turned out of booths to which there were duly accredited, of the since infamous Form 45, containing the official record of votes cast for each candidate in every constituency being illegally withheld, and what the ECP was pleased to call shortcomings ‘procedural in nature’, but the principal delinquent in 2018 turned out to be the new-fangled Results Transmission System, whose collapse caused an unprecedented and understandably suspicious delay in provisional results being conveyed to polling agents and the hungry media. So, ostensibly, casually introduced new software without proper prior testing, and not the ‘hardcore’ blatant rigging of the past was to blame, a deficiency the ECP secretary readily conceded.
The 2018 elections reportedly cost the national exchequer, already in a vegetative state, the astronomical sum of twenty one billion rupees, and the ECP and NADRA, which developed the RTS, should be held accountable for the embarrassing fiasco that led to risky manual collection and inordinately delayed compilation of result data, and as late as Friday, still 95 percent of results were expected by ECP. No doubt the total number of registered voters was an all-time high of 105.96 million (60.67 million in Punjab), some returning officers conveyed NADRA in writing the malfunction of the RTS in basic pre-poll tasks and their apprehensions of it crashing on the Big Day. And unlike some political pundits, their predictions rang true, needlessly raising questions of fairness, transparency and ultimately, credibility, of the election exercise.