Around 4 million dead voters. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has admitted this glaring discrepancy in its records for the upcoming Punjab by-polls. “Human errors,” they say. The Commission says that the errors will be rectified; how it plans to do so in such a short period is anyone’s guess.
The folk over at the ECP should have realised that it takes errors less glaring, and smaller, than this for the PTI to call foul on the whole exercise to begin with, specially if they lose. The PTI, of course, isn’t the only party that has a gripe against the ECP. The failure of the RTS system during the 2018 polls results tabulation was such a disaster that it has become a permanent part of the pop-cultural lexicon, as a euphemism for the system, so to speak, to be gamed in favour, or against, a political party.
The ECP has a lot in common with the judiciary, chiefly in the expectation that it should not only be just but be seen to be just, impartial and neutral.
Seven-and-a-half decades in, our hapless republic is still a nascent democracy. Democracy is a process, not a state of being; even fluent, old democracies are constantly bettering themselves and even those fluent, established democracies can run into some problems, like the occasional fever of fascism – or something closely resembling it – that rears its head occasionally in them. But in Pakistan’s case, even procedural democracy is floundering. For that, an efficient and meticulous election apparatus is a must. It needs to be equipped with the best equipment and people, at all levels, by those best at their jobs. At the risk of sounding dramatic, the future of our democracy, and by extension, the very future of the republic itself, depends on it.
