ISLAMABAD: Former Prime Minister and PMLN Senior Vice President Shahid Khaqan Abbasi says the PTI government’s desperation to impose Electronic Voting Machines despite 37 objections by the Election Commission shows they want to use the EVMs to rig the next elections.
Speaking at a press conference flanked by PMLN Secretary General Ahsan Iqbal and Secretary Information Marriyum Aurangzeb, Abbasi said the PTI did not want to accept that the decision of using EVMs could be made only by the Election Commission and not the government.
He said the representatives of the Election Commission had clearly pointed out how these machines were extremely prone to rigging at multiple levels. He said the cost of at least 1 million of such machines alone was a big question. Then the data for every machine would be different for every polling stations.Even after that the commission had said that their operating system could easily be tempered with to yield desired results. He said they also pointed out that the machines clearly violate the constitutional secrecy of the ballot and it was easily possible to know exactly who voted for who. Also the machines were prone to errors and votes could be polled to the wrong candidate. The Election Commission in its objections also said that it was virtually impossible to track and find out the possibility 0f rigging through these machines.
Abbasi the Election Commission also pointed out how successful Western Democracies including Germany, Holland, Italy and Finland had used and discarded the EVMs ruling that they were not effective mechanisms and could not play any role in eliminating rigging and I fact created more problems than it solved.
He said that the commission pointed out that the stakeholders of the Election process were not in consensus at all over the use of EVMs including political parties, Parliament, election monitors, civil societies or NGOs and such major decisions cannot be implemented just by a majority in Parliament.
The Commission also laid it out clearly that this major change could not be implemented without making major changes in the constitution and even after that repeated test runs or trial, evaluation, monitoring and troubleshooting, only after which it could be analysed if they were a viable nationwide option. Even after all these observations the Election Commission flat out refused that EVMs could be used.
