Islamabad: Pakistan’s top electoral watchdog will conduct a mock test of its online system Friday to transmit and tabulate the results of the February 8 general elections, a media report said Wednesday.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has prepared the Election Management System (EMS) app for the transmission of results from each polling station to a centralised system where tabulation of all results would be completed.
Through a letter addressed to all four provincial election commissioners, the ECP issued standard operating procedures and guidelines to hold a mock exercise of EMS January 26, the Dawn newspaper reported.
According to the letter, all returning officers (ROs) must certify and finalise Forms 28 and 33 in the EMS and map the presiding officers to polling stations till January 25.
The said forms carry details of candidates and the number of polling stations in each constituency, according to the report.
The top election body’s letter added that dummy Form-45 will be provided to all ROs Thursday, and they will ask the presiding officers to send results of one-two pages of each National Assembly and Provincial Assembly constituency from their mobile app Friday at 5 pm.
The letter gave detailed procedures to be followed on Friday and said that after the mock exercise, ROs and EMS operators will ensure that all presiding officers have cleared cache data as per guidelines. “Mock poll data/result may be cleared, and your phone will be ready for the actual result on the poll day, i.e. February 8, 2024,” the letter added.
During the previous elections in 2018, the ECP’s Result Transmission System (RTS) was clogged when thousands of polling stations began sending results from all parts of the country, causing delays in the announcement of results of some constituencies, which the losing parties exploited as “an allegedly conscious effort to rig the results.”
With the elections barely two weeks away, the ECP is trying not to leave any loose ends in the EMS to avoid the repetition of old allegations of fraud.
Separately, the ECP has frozen all development funds of local governments with immediate effect till the results of the general election are announced so that voters cannot be blackmailed in the name of development.
PTI