In the Sindh Legislative Assembly elections, the PPP has taken the lead in Karachi as the ECP has revealed partial results.
Political parties decry delay in Karachi, Hyderabad LG election outcomes.
KARACHI: The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) is now in the lead with 86 seats after the partial results of the local government elections in Karachi were revealed by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Monday.
Out of the 253 seats in the Karachi division, results for 205 seats have been sent to the election watchdog.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won 37 seats, while Jamat-e-Islami (JI) came in second with 68 seats. The 30 unfilled seats’ outcomes are still awaited.
The first district to submit its voting results was Matiari. The results of all 345 polling locations for 30 Union Councils (UC), six town committees, and one municipal committee in Matiari were sent to the drop box of the provincial election commissioner’s office, according to regional election commissioner and district returning officer (DRO) Matiari Syed Nadeem Haider.
ECP: LG poll results are “complex and take time.”
In response to complaints from political parties about the delay in releasing local body election results, the ECP stated on Monday that it is a “complicated matter that takes time” and provided assurance that the results that have been compiled were being sent to the returning officers’ (RO) office.
Ijaz Anwar Chauhan, the provincial election commissioner for Sindh, explained the reason for the delay in results to the media.
“This is a challenging procedure, and preparing the outcomes of one union council takes time.”
Each UC has four wards and, on average, 20 polling places, according to Chauhan. He continued by saying that the results of the entire UC would be insufficient if even one polling place’s results were unavailable.
In the meantime, Jamaat-e-Islami, PTI, and PPP questioned why the election results had taken so long to be announced and requested that they be made public right away.
Saeed Ghani, the president of the PPP in Karachi, expressed concern that the prolonged delay might make the entire election process contentious and encouraged the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to complete its work as soon as feasible.
Hafiz Naeemur Rehman, the leader of JI Karachi and a candidate for mayor, asserted that Forms 11 and 12 were not given to the party and that election results were being rigged. The deputy commissioner had requested a recount, he continued.
Rehman threatened to hold a sit-in to protest the theft of Karachi’s mandate if the results were tampered with.
PTI employees demonstrated outside the district returning officer’s and deputy commissioner west’s offices (DRO). The PPP leader and former president Asif Ali Zardari, according to the demonstrators, had turned the police into his army and was using them to rig the election.
The preliminary election results would be made public on Monday, according to earlier reports from ECP sources.
With the exception of a few surprises caused by the PTI and the Grand Democratic Alliance, the PPP appears to have swept the LG polls in all nine districts of the Hyderabad Division, according to unofficial results (GDA).
According to the JI spokesperson, his party won more than 100 seats in Karachi, followed by the PPP with over 80 seats and the PTI with 50 seats.
According to the preliminary, unconfirmed results, no party had been able to win a clear majority for the position of mayor.
According to unofficial results, some wards had representatives who had won by between 31 and 150 votes.
