APROPOS the headline, ‘Imran Khan says will come out on streets against ECP’ (Aug 26). The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), in its reply to the PTI letter, said that it was a constitutional body and not answerable to a political party.

The ECP may be right in not responding to a political party. But as a taxpayer citizen and as voter, may I ask the ECP a question? Before the 2013 general elections, the ECP had claimed that it had adopted fool-proof measures to stop rigging and it would be able to audit every single vote in case of any controversy.

For this, the ECP spent Rs100m to procure so-called magnetic ink from the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

It was also claimed that the specialised ink has properties which would make thumbprint of every voter easily readable. After the election, cases of over 30 constituencies were sent to Nadra to verify thumbprints of voters. For most of these constituencies, Nadra reported that 75pc thumbprints were not unreadable.

The present Nadra chief is on record saying that they only have ordinary scanners that only capture the visual image of the fingerprint and not the magnetic field of the fingerprint. In order to read magnetic ink, specialised magnetic ink character readers (MICRs) were required. If Nadra did not have the capability of reading magnetic ink, why was Rs100 million of taxpayers’ money wasted in buying it?

Even the judicial commission, formed to investigate the alleged rigging of the 2013 election, failed to look into the controversy related to magnetic ink.

A taxpayer

Karachi

Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2015

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