Politicians least interested in expediting electoral reforms

ISLAMABAD: All parliamentary sides especially those which had been crying hoarse demanding electoral reforms have ceased to remember any massive improvement in the poll system to diminish the chances of election manipulation.
Every side has its own priorities to pursue, and none is eager to accelerate the finalization of the electoral reforms that a bipartisan committee is dealing with for over a year now.
Previously, the committee’s work was affected for several months due to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) sit-in, but even after ending its protest, it has not pushed the committee hard to expedite its work.
“The committee headed by Finance Minister Senator Ishaq Dar has completed almost 90pc work with consensus,” a senior government representative told The News.
The drafting of the constitutional amendments has been started, he said adding that all election laws will be converted into one statute.
The actual problem that is delaying an early conclusion of the package is that some parliamentary parties are in no hurry to wrap it up. They have other political concerns and preferences.
But still every side agrees that the electoral reforms are the fundamental work that would drastically cut down the complaints and protests that emerge after every parliamentary election.
A subcommittee led by Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Zahid Hamid is doing the real job to give final shape to the recommendations for reforms. It too apparently doesn’t have any sense of urgency.
The PTI has been in the forefront in disputing not only the 2013 general elections but most of the subsequent by-polls including the high-profile electoral contest to be held in Lahore on October 11, but its interest and contribution in introducing electoral reforms without any delay has been extremely low.
If the PTI pushes the government to speed up finalization of the reforms package, the latter is unlikely to take any longer time to bring the important

assignment to a close. However, the Imran Khan team is more keen to public campaigning on every issue instead of doing some worthwhile work by sitting and engaging with other lawmakers in a serious discussion.
There is a complete consensus that the planned electoral reforms would dispense with serious grievances that the political parties often air after the parliamentary polls.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) says at least 90pc of its lapses and shortcomings, pinpointed in the report of the judicial commission, which inquired into the charges of rigging in the 2013 polls and dismissed them, will go away after the impending electoral reforms.
The subcommittee has approved fiscal autonomy to the ECP and has reached consensus on 13 constitutional amendments. It has also deliberated upon the existing six electoral laws.
Besides Imran Khan, the PML-N too has its own complaints against the ECP. Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique and National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq, who were unseated by the election tribunals, registered their grave grudges after the rulings that they had been punished for the irregularities committed by the election staff.
The judicial commission’s findings have provided guidelines to the parliamentary committee to remove all objections and reservations identified in its report. The ECP continues to give its output to the committee to improve the electoral system.
An official said that had the reforms recommended by the ECP been introduced earlier before the last general elections as repeatedly urged by it, most of the lapses and shortcomings, listed in the commission’s report, would not have arisen.
The commission particularly mentioned nine examples of poor planning by ECP including lack of a formula for determining excess ballots; the decision to rely on only four printing presses; belated shifting of ballot papers from one press to other; failure to develop effective voter verification method; failure to establish and use an effective results management system; late provision of election material to some polling stations; and lack of its own storage space.
The report said the formula for determining excess ballots i.e. rounding up on the basis of polling stations was not adequately communicated to the returning officers (ROs), particularly in the Punjab. Even otherwise the method of calculating the number of excess ballots was not uniform throughout Pakistan.