The knocking on its doors keeps growing louder. How long can the ECP ignore it? Over the weekend, Pakistan’s most prominent elections monitoring body as well as its top human rights watchdog have added their voices to calls for an audit of election results.

On Saturday, the same day a senior bureaucrat had ‘confessed’ to his involvement in results tampering, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan expressed its reservations regarding the “integrity and credibility” of the Feb 8 exercise, noting a range of issues that it said had “cast a shadow over the democratic process”.

A day later, the Free and Fair Election Network urged the ECP to take immediate action and address complaints regarding illegalities committed in the compilation of election results. It also proposed a three-phase process to comprehensively address the widespread allegations of rigging, which is based on an audit of each step in the results consolidation process.

In Pakistan, it is almost customary for election candidates to refuse to acknowledge their defeat. Except a few, most are generally quick to cast aspersions and question the integrity of any election which does not go in their favour.

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