Dawn.com staff Siham Basir witnessed a “dismal” voter turnout at a polling station in Karachi’s NA-241 constituency. She said the lines were not very long at the Government Girls College, Zamzama and by the time she left, there was no line at all.

“One polling officer seemed completely untrained because she was not even able to cross our names out let alone find our names efficiently. The greatest inefficiency was in checking the electoral rolls,” she said.

“At my polling station, there were a lot of elderly people — people in wheelchairs and using walking sticks — but they were made to walk up a flight of stairs instead of a facility being made available on the ground floor. I witnessed one elderly man being carried up in his wheelchair and one man having to physically lift his mother up the stairs so she could vote,” she noted.

“Despite going at 8am and being among the first people there, some of the polling agents were rude and were yelling. They also didn’t check for mobile phones — a man pulled out his phone in front of me to ask the presiding officer something,” she said.