By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A day after Pakistan held a tumultuous election, the country remained in a state of suspense and confusion on Friday, as the election commission failed to announce the official results amid a nationwide internet blackout and allegations of vote rigging.
The supporters of the former prime minister Imran Khan, who is serving multiple prison sentences on corruption, espionage, and unlawful marriage charges, claimed that his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, had won a landslide victory over the party of Nawaz Sharif, the three-time former prime minister who is backed by the powerful military establishment.
According to the unofficial and incomplete results reported by the media, the PTI-backed independent candidates were ahead of their rivals in several national and provincial assembly seats, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and some parts of Punjab, the most populous and politically influential province.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, however, maintained its lead in some urban areas of Punjab. The Pakistan Peoples Party, led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the son of the late former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, appeared to have retained its stronghold in Sindh.
Gohar Khan, a PTI leader, claimed that the party had won a two-thirds majority in the national and provincial assemblies.
“I strictly warn all returning officers not to try to tamper with the results,” he said at a press conference on Friday. “We have all the evidence of rigging, and we will not accept any manipulation.”
However, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) said it had received only a fraction of the results from more than 90,000 polling stations across the country, blaming a technical glitch in its new electronic system that was supposed to speed up the counting process.
The government faced criticism for its decision to suspend cellular services in most parts of the country on the pretext of security threats, which hampered the communication and monitoring of the voting process.
The ECP’s much-touted Election Management System (EMS), which was supposed to transmit the results electronically from the polling stations to the central server, malfunctioned and stopped working in the middle of the night.
The ECP did not offer any explanation for the technical glitch, which delayed the announcement of the official results for hours. Some media outlets quoted the Chief Election Commissioner, Sikandar Sultan Raja, as confirming that the EMS had crashed, while others reported that he had denied any such problem.
The commission had to resort to manually collecting the results from the presiding officers, who had to physically deliver them to the returning officers in their districts.
The delay in announcing the results fueled suspicions of foul play among political parties, who accused the military of interfering in the election to favor Sharif and his party, PML-N.
The military has dominated the nuclear-armed country either directly or indirectly in its 76 years of independence, but for several years it has maintained it does not interfere in politics.
The military said it played a pivotal role along with the law enforcement agencies in the peaceful conduct of the general elections, hoping it would strengthen the political system in the country and help its people realize their democratic aspirations.
In a statement issued shortly after the polling process came to an end in the country, the military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations, congratulated the nation on participating in the national polls that it said were largely violence-free.
“With the deployment of 137,000 army personnel and civil armed forces at approximately 6,000 selected most sensitive polling stations and over 7800 QRFs [Quick Response Forces], a safe and secure environment for the public was ensured,” the statement said.
The armed forces’ statement highlighted that nearly 50 militant attacks occurred, predominantly in the Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, aiming to disrupt the electoral process.
“Gratitude is owed to other law enforcement agencies that worked hand in hand with the armed forces to safeguard the democratic process,” the statement added. “It is our fervent hope that our sacrifices would not be in vain and this election will serve as a catalyst for further strengthening democracy in Pakistan, and that it will pave the way for the realization of the aspirations of the people of Pakistan.”
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