HEADS I win, tails you lose. The amendments made to the Election Act, 2017, on the fly, to paper over the various discrepancies in the elections held on Feb 8, 2024, change the entire electoral dynamic ex post facto. After the elections, the purported ‘winners’ are being given a free pass to change the rules of the game, to maintain their claim of being the winners, upending the manner by which those seeking to question the winning status could have brought that challenge before neutral arbiters.
As in the case of many elections held before, the ones that were held earlier this year were tainted. Concocting numbers in the Forms-47 was the new modus operandi.
In the past, elections have been managed through other means as well. In recent memory, in the 2021 Daska by-elections, almost a couple of dozen presiding officers simply went missing, and remained so for an entire night. They emerged in the morning, to present figures to the Returning Officer that were entirely different from the ones they had before they went missing. At that time, the Election Commission of Pakistan had some teeth; and the top court upheld the ECP’s directions for a re-poll in the entire constituency. The........