ISLAMABAD: People in two constituencies of Karachi went to a peaceful election on Thursday amid heavy presence of security forces and an unusually assertive Election Commission enforcing the election rules, the Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) said in its election observation report.

However, procedural irregularities were observed to have persisted in the two by-elections with Fafen reporting an average of 4.8 violations per polling station.

The election was managed by the ECP-appointed district returning and returning officers and held under the security cover of Rangers who were also vested with the magisterial powers. The polling was relatively better managed keeping in view the traditional context of Karachi where quality of elections has remained questionable, said the report.

The two by-elections followed the enforcement plan that had been devised for the NA-246 by-election last year whose quality was appreciated by all political parties.

Election fervour in NA-245 (Karachi-VII), however, dampened after the last-minute withdrawal of the PTI candidate in favour of MQM, it said.

The election in PS-115 (Karachi-XXVII) was tightly contested among the candidates of the MQM, PTI, PPP and the MQM-Haqiqi. The turnout in the two constituencies, however, remained visibly low, although the exact percentage of polled votes would be clear after the final results were announced by the ECP.

Apart from a few instances of violence, the election day remained peaceful. The removal of party camps from outside a number of polling stations during the day established the ECP’s resolve to strengthen its enforcement of laws and rules, improving the polling environment for voters.

By-election in NA-245 was necessitated by the resignation of MQM’s Rehan Hashmi after his election as vice chairman of a union committee in the recently held local government elections in Sindh. Mr Hashmi had polled 115,776 votes in 2013 against PTI’s Mohammad Riaz Haider who had bagged 54,937 votes.

In all, 16 candidates contested Thursday’s by-election in the constituency, which spans over nine union committees and has remained a stronghold of the MQM.

The NA-245 showed an increase of seven per cent in the number of registered voters — 409,655 (221,242 male and 188,413 female) for by-election as compared to 383,748 (208,050 male and 175,698 female) in 2013 general election. However, the number of polling stations for the two elections remained the same — 277 polling stations with 796 polling booths (407 for men and 389 for women).

Fafen had deployed a total of 44 (28 men and 16 women) trained, non-partisan observers in NA-245 and 18 (14 men and 4 women) in PS-115.

The observers were required to spend at least an hour at each polling station and document their findings on a standardised checklist based on the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, 1976, Conduct of Elections Rules, 1977, and instructional handbooks provided to the election officials by the ECP.

At only three of the observed polling stations, polling agents raised objections that the election officials were not following the defined procedure. Similarly, there were only two polling stations where unauthorised persons were present before the start of the polling.

Although, the ECP removed the party camps outside a number of polling stations, there were still 12 polling stations in both constituencies where political parties and the contesting candidates were observed to have set up the camps. The law disallows party camps within a radius of 400 yards of a polling station.

The use of transportation by candidates to bring voters to polling stations was also negligible and was observed outside only six polling stations.

Fafen observers were barred from observing the voting process at nine polling stations – all in NA-245. The restriction came mostly from security officials who refused to permit the observers despite the ECP’s accreditation cards and instead asked for an authority letter.

At 20 of the observed female booths, male staff was deployed. Of these, at two booths, some women did not vote because of the presence of male staff.

Registering a significant improvement as compared to high prevalence of incidents of the breach of privacy in the local government elections, Fafen observers reported from 13 polling booths that unauthorised persons were accompanying voters behind secrecy screens. In two instances, a polling official and a polling agent were seen to be stamping ballot on behalf of voters.

Published in Dawn, April 8th, 2016