Imran Khan condemns the Election Tribunal

Lahore: Chairman PTI, Imran Khan, today strongly condemned the continuing vacillation of the Election Tribunal in opening up NA 122 for vote recount and thumbprint verification despite the overwhelming evidence of irregularities that have become evident in PP 147 with only 6 polling stations having been opened for verification.

Khan stated that NADRA has revealed that in the 6 polling stations opened up in PP 147, 3,267 of the 4,726 votes could not be verified, while Nadra identified that the CNIC numbers written on 696 vote counterfoils were fake. In addition, 69% of the votes polled in these 6 polling stations of PP-147 were found to be bogus. Khan added that, interestingly, 117 polling stations in PP-147 fell under NA-122 from where he had contested. In the 6 polling stations there were also 1,590 vote counterfoils that carried fingerprints of bad quality affixed on used counterfoils due to non-utilisation of proper ink.

The Election Tribunal judge has committed to opening up the whole PP 147 for verification if discrepancies were found in the 6 polling stations but so far nothing had been done in this regard. Another glaring sign of blatant rigging was the discovery of 7 bags of votes in the 6 polling stations when each polling station has to have only one bag comprising of the votes. If the opening up of a mere 6 polling stations had revealed such massive fraud, the opening up of the 290 polling stations of NA 122 would show even more shocking evidence of  vote tampering and rigging. Chairman Khan asserted that despite this clear evidence of wrongdoing, the Election Tribunal which was considering his petition for opening up of NA 122 for verification had failed to move on operationalising the petition.

Khan wondered why NA Speaker Ayaz Sadiq was seeking shelter behind court stay orders, one after another, instead of having the moral courage to seek the truth through vote and thumbprint verifications? Khan said that under the circumstances Ayaz Sadiq had lost all moral credibility and should resign from the Speakership till the verification process for NA 122 had been completed. Khan was categorical in stating that had the PMLN not been obdurate in preventing the auditing of votes and thumbprint verifications in the 4 constitutencies, the PTI would not have been pushed into coming out into the streets.

As it is the PTI waited for over a year to seek justice against rigging in all available forums from Election Tribunals to the Courts, including the SC, to the Parliament – all to no avail with the PMLN hiding behind all manner of ruses by playing for time to prevent the rigging from being exposed. Khan added that it was obvious why the PMLN government was unwilling to allow the opening up of the 4 constituencies demanded by PTI; because if these 4 constituencies were opened the PMLN’s massive planned rigging would stand exposed and their government would lose all moral and legal grounds to govern. Khan asserted that one of the clearest proofs of planned rigging was the vote jump supposedly for N from the 6,805,304 votes they got in the 2008 elections to the rigged 14,874,104 votes they claimed in the 2013 elections.

For a party that performed poorly on all fronts in Punjab where they were in power after 2008, it is inconceivable that their vote bamk would have jumped to more than double in 2013. Barring the controversial jangla bus in Lahore, the PMLN government’s performance in Punjab in the agriculture and industrial sector was abysmal. Loadshedding reached new heights and protests against the PMLN government in Punjab came from all segments of society – from teachers, clerks, doctors, students, farmers and industrialists. So the vote count in 2013 was clearly rigged.

Khan concluded by vowing that PTI would expose the electoral fraud of 2013 because the people of Pakistan needed to know that those who sought to steal their mandate would be brought to justice. Also, without this expose and punishment for those involved in rigging in 2013, electoral reforms for the future would not be meaningful.