LAHORE: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) president and National Assembly Opposition Leader Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday rejected a proposal presented by Prime Minister Imran Khan to employ electronic voting during elections to restore credibility of elections.
The prime minister on Saturday once again invited the opposition parties to participate in selecting from electronic voting machines (EVM) models “available to us to restore the credibility of our elections”.
Responding to the invitation through a statement, Sharif said that the whole world — including the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — has already turned down the concept of electronic voting.
پاکستان مسلم لیگ (ن) کے صدر اور قائد حزب اختلاف شہبازشریف نے الیکڑانک ووٹنگ مشین کے استعمال کی تجویز مسترد کر دی
الیکڑانک ووٹنگ کانظام تمام دنیانے مسترد کیا، پاکستانی الیکشن کمشن ناقابل عمل قرار دے چکا ہے؛ ایک فردکی خواہش یا حکم پر ایسے اہم قومی کام انجام نہیں پاتے
— President PMLN (@president_pmln) May 2, 2021
“Such kind of important national decisions cannot be implemented on the orders or will of a specific person,” he added.
He added said that electoral reforms can only be introduced with a consensus and said his party did the same in the past with consensus.
The PML-N president said that claims of opposition demanding the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) were raised when it was forwarding positive suggestions for reforms.
سب کے اتفاق رائے کا مظہر اور دستخط شدہ انتخابی اصلاحات کی وہ تاریخی دستاویز آج بھی موجود ہے
جس وقت اپوزیشن مثبت تجاویز اور میثاق معیشت کی بات کررہی تھی تو این آر او ، این آر او کا شور وغل مچاکر ان کی توہین کی گئی
— President PMLN (@president_pmln) May 2, 2021
Terming the parliament a centre and reflection of the aspirations of people, he said: “It has been locked up for the last three years.” “We can undertake electoral reforms as we have the patience and will to take political rivals along and implement their proposals.”
Shehbaz recalled that the PML-N undertook historic political reforms in 2017 with the consultation of all political parties, including the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
The PML-N government had okayed reforms to electoral laws making it mandatory for political parties to allot five per cent of their tickets to women candidates.
“No one had objected to those reforms as it was a reflection of endorsement by all,” Sharif said.
Imran has on several occasions expressed his desire to pursue electoral reforms in order to ensure that in future, elections are not disputed and winners and losers both accept the result.
Votes, the prime minister says, can be miscounted, misread, or even simply misplaced. In the manual practice, counts consist of thousands of people across the country who stay up all night manually sorting and counting those votes. When they go wrong, there’s no easy way to trace the problems back to their source, and no easy way to fix them other than simply restarting the count.
But in the past, the opposition has rejected these proposals and has said it would bring its own set of proposals for a comprehensive reform of the electoral process.
Opposition leaders explained that while they will not engage with the government as a matter of principle, they will continue to proceed with their parliamentary duties as well as their work in the committees.
Responding to Shehbaz’s comments, Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Fawad Chaudhry said that PML-N’s escape from negotiations on electoral reforms in the country was very unfortunate.
The information minister took to the twitter and said that PML-N’s claim that the reform process has to be done by the Election Commission instead of the parliament showed that they have no understanding of the system and no interest in reforms.
Why a party always coming to power through conspiracies would go for electoral reforms, he remarked.
