Nearly seven months after its controversial conduct of the 2024 general election, the Election Commission of Pakistan has quietly tasked 38 teams with verifying that the physical copies of all election-related documentation match the digital record accessible to the public.

The development comes two months after an NGO, Pattan-Coalition 38, first pointed out that critical documents for over a dozen constituencies were missing from the ECP’s website. Though the report was initially rubbished by the ECP as ‘baseless’, the ‘missing’ documents were quietly added in the following days to the public drive on which election forms had been stored, as independent scrutiny conducted by this publication had also confirmed.

The Form 45 results of at least 41 national and provincial assembly constituencies in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were ‘updated’ during this exercise, and the development had raised fresh doubts about the legitimacy of the ECP’s announced results for the Feb 8 election.

It seems pertinent to recall here what the ECP had said on Feb 12, after four days of silence while the entire nation clamoured for it to release final results. While citing security and logistics reasons for the delay, the ECP spokesperson had insisted that “accuracy was more important than the swift announcement of election results.”

This statement had been issued at a time when serious concerns were being raised about seats swinging from victors to the vanquished in the results finalisation process.

The commission had then violated Section 95 of the Elections Act of 2017 by failing to upload Forms 45, 46 and 47 on its website by Feb 22 — the end of a 14-day deadline to do so. It also ignored a call from Fafen to audit the paper trail of election results, under its power to adjudicate results before the expiration of 60 days after gazette notification of a returned candidate.

To date, just around two dozen of nearly 400 petitions against the ECP’s results have been decided by the election tribunals set up for that purpose. While progress has been anaemic across the board, it is worth noting that the tribunals for Islamabad and Punjab, which together account for more than 50pc of the petitions filed, remain largely inoperative due to hurdles created by the ECP.

It now seems a given that, just like the deadline for announcing results was missed, the deadline for resolving pending election disputes will also lapse without settling the many controversies surrounding them. The entire exercise has become riddled with controversy, yet the relevant institution seems unwilling to address the lingering questions about the polls.

If, seven months later, the ECP still does not know how many of its documents are in order, perhaps its top officials should call it a day. They have already done a huge disservice to Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2024