ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: The Election Commission hearing rigging complaints was informed on Saturday that at a polling station in NA-210 Jacoabad III, from where a joint candidate of Sindh Democratic Alliance and National Alliance Saleem Jan Mazari was contesting the turn out remained as high as 313 per cent.
The total number of registered votes in the polling station No. 163, according to official gazette was 273, whereas the results announced by the Election Commission showed that 855 votes were polled there.
The Election Commission allegedly hushed up the complaints supported by conclusive evidence of rigging and glaring discrepancies in the results, PPP complainants later told a joint press conference.
The commission, after going through these evidences, refused to give interim relief and said that a report would be sought from the concerned returning officer, Imran Khan Bijrani PPP candidate from NA-210 said.
Mr Bijrani who lost to Saleem Jan Mazari apprised the commission that only two days before the polling day some 54 polling stations in his constituency were shifted to remote and inaccessible places.
At all these polling stations the turn out remained almost 99 per cent and interestingly in all these polling stations his rival candidate got maximum number of votes.
The turnout in the rest of the constituency from where he got the majority of votes was around 30 to 35 per cent, he added.
He also brought to the notice of the commission that at least four presiding officers had given statements to the returning officer that their polling stations were raided by the supporters of Saleem Jan Mazari, who physically assaulted them and stuffed ballot boxes and acquired their signatures at gunpoint, therefore the results of their polling stations be considered as null and void.
Mr Bijrani said he had been provided three different sheets of consolidated results and the figures of number of votes polled, number of invalid votes and votes obtained by him in the three sheets did not tally.
In another complaint, filed by the PPP candidate Javed Shah Jillani, who lost to a PML(F) candidate Sadruddin Shah youngest son of Pir Pagara, evidence of ballot stuffing in 28 selected polling stations of his constituency was provided to the commission.
Mr Jillani also challenged the matriculation certificate filed by Sadruddin Shah claiming that his opponent was not even a matriculate.
Sadruddin Shah, he said, had claimed that he had done his matriculation from Saint Paul’s School Karachi in 1979. Jillani produced a school leaving certificate issued by Saint Paul’s English High School, which showed that a student Sadruddin who had done his matric in 1979 was the son of Hyderali Habib and not Pir Ali Mardan Shah known as Pir Pagara.