ISLAMABAD – The Election Commission of Pakistan has withheld issuing notification of Karachi’s PS-114 by-election result, where Pakistan Peoples Party’s Saeed Ghani had won on July 9.
On the surface, the notification has been withheld due to the reason that Muttahida Qaumi Movement had challenged the result in the ECP alleging that the results were tampered.
MQM- once Karachi’s biggest political force -had requested the commission to order recounting of the votes of the entire constituency and verify thumb impressions through National Database and Registration Authority.
MQM’s perception that the elections were rigged gained weight when a ballot box was discovered in a private car in the city’s Mehmoodabad area on Wednesday.
Advocate Iqbal Qadri, who is also a member of the National Assembly belonging to the MQM from Karachi, filed an application in the ECP headquarters in Islamabad on behalf of Kamran Khan Tessori, the MQM candidate in the PS-114 constituency.
On the other hand, speaking to newsmen outside ECP, MQM-Pakistan Head Farooq Sattar said that those in power had misused it to change the results of the general elections in 2013 too.
“Conditions of those polling stations has stayed the same. Yet again, violence was used to tamper the results,” said Sattar.
“ECP should recount votes and take thumb impression so that people know who are the ones who got real votes, and who are those that cheated,” he added.
“During the by-elections difficulties were created for the voters. Now, all of those problems have been brought to the forefront,” he remarked, adding “we hope that we are given justice.”
Pakistan Peoples Party stalwart Saeed Ghani had overpowered his rivals by a landslide majority as he bagged 23,840 votes against his closest rival Kamran Tessori of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, who got 18,106 votes.
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s Ali Akbar Gujjar became third as he got 5,353 votes; followed by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s Engineer Najeeb Haroon (5,098 votes) and Jamaat-i-Islami’s Zahoor Jadoon bagged 1,661 votes.
The seat fell vacant after Irfanullah Marwat — who won the seat in the 2013 general elections on the PML-N ticket by defeating MQM candidate Rauf Siddiqui — was unseated as the election result was declared void by an election tribunal.
