KARACHI: The Election Commission of Pakistan has announced that by-election on the seat vacated by Sindh Governor Imran Ismail, which is PS-111 constituency of Karachi South-V, will be held on October 21, 2018.

According to the ECP notification, the nomination could be filed from Sept 6 to Sept 8 while the candidates’ list will be made public on Sept 9 and scrutiny of nominations would be carried out on Sept 14.

The appeals against acceptance or rejection of nominations could be received by Sept 17, which will be decided by Sept 19 while next day the list of valid candidates will be notified. The candidates could withdraw their nomination by Sept 24 and the next day election symbol would be allotted to the candidates in the field while polling would be held on Oct 21.

Regional election commissioner of Karachi Ali Asghar Sial would be district returning officer while district election commissioner of Kashmore Zaheer Ahmed Sahito would act as the returning officer. Assistant commissioner of Civil Lines, Karachi, Mohammad Nabeel Riaz and taluka education officer of Saddar Town, Karachi, Jawaid Ali Abbasi would perform the duty of assistant returning officers.

NA-243 Karachi

According to another notification, for the by-election on NA-243 Karachi East-II seat, which is scheduled for Oct 14, 2018, a total of 33 nominations were received by the returning officer till August 30, 2018, which was the last date for filing the nominations.

Some of the prominent names in the run include Faisal Subzwari, Mehfoozyar Khan, Aamir Waliuddin Chishti, Arslan Khan of MQM, Alamgir Khan, Aftab Siddiqui, Ashraf Qureshi of PTI, Asif Hasnain, Muzammil Qureshi and Hassan Sabir of PSP, Hakim Ali and Ms Gule Raana Azhar of PPP, Arif Qadri and Nawaz-ul-Huda of TLP, Naeem Akhtar of MMA and Rao Jamil and Sharafat Hussain of PML-N.

The scrutiny of the nomination papers would be completed by Sept 4 while appeals against rejection or acceptance of the nomination papers could be filed by Sept 8 which will be decided by the tribunal by Sept 13, followed by publication of the revised list of candidates.

The candidates could withdraw their nomination papers by Sept 15. The election symbol would be allotted to the candidates on Sept 16.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2018