The PTI and a partially rigged election

Imran Khan has one in-built advantage in his quixotic quest to convince the country that last year’s elections were rigged: we don’t have free and fair elections ‘round these parts. You don’t need to look very hard to find discrepancies, cheating and manipulation. There are always enough incidents to fill a White Paper and with sufficient pressure – a Long March, for instance – it isn’t very difficult to turn isolated incidents into a grand conspiracy.

It is easy for me empathise with the PTI, even while disavowing its ultimate aim of forcing out the government and immediately holding new elections, because of my traumatic experience in trying to cast a vote for the party in Karachi’s infamous NA-250 constituency.

Arriving at my polling station a few minutes before voting was scheduled to start, in the hope that I could quickly cast my ballot and get a few, precious hours of extra sleep on this rare holiday I ended up waiting hours. First, there were no polling agents. Then we found there were no ballots on which to mark our votes. About seven hours into this ordeal under the sweltering May sky in a school filled with enthusiastic PTI supporters I gave up. The fix was in, I assumed.

The reality, as always, is more nuanced. Yes, this was an example of rigging, and a particularly blatant one at that. But the culprit here wasn’t the PML-N or a caretaker government that has now been accused of fixing elections in favour of the party but was then a consensus pick of the political parties. This is just how elections are conducted in Pakistan.

Rigging last year was a mostly local phenomenon. Heavyweight political parties in a constituency, or even individual candidates able to take over the political machinery in an area, would give themselves any advantage they could. In NA-250, the MQM realised that support for the PTI would be overwhelming in certain areas and decided, in its usual crude manner, not to allow voting to take place there. Even this ended up not working since the constituency is one of the most heavily-covered in the area and the ECP was forced to allow re-polling.

The PTI, rigid and unbending that it is, would point to these shenanigans and cry itself hoarse about countrywide rigging. But one – or even five or six – tainted seats do not point to a grand national conspiracy. Our electoral history is filled with stolen elections but 2013 wasn’t one of them. It was an improvement on 2008, which itself was fairer than 2002. The evolution towards freer elections should be lauded with necessary lessons learned to improve them still further.

There are practices from the 2008 election which we should avoid. ECP staff are prone to pressure from political parties that have a dominant presence in an area so we may consider sending in more agents from outside the constituency who will not be as likely to bend to their wishes. Counting needs to be more transparent and perhaps media organisations can abide by a code of conduct that does not allow for provisional vote tallies to be announced on air. Such incremental changes, rather than a wholesale disavowal of results that have not proven to be unfair, can improve the way we go about conducting elections.

The PTI wants perfection in a state where perfection is not yet possible. Attempts to hold an election where no vote is miscounted and no fraud countenanced has the paradoxical effect of making even legitimate results seem tainted. You only have to look to Nadra’s use of fingerprint technology to see this in action. Using thumbprints on ballots to match voter names in the Nadra database is an inherently flawed exercise since fingerprint technology is nowhere near exact and will lead to many – perhaps millions – of unverified votes. Using the imperfect nature of science to prove fraud is useful for propagandist purposes but little else.

It is hard to know if the PTI believes its own rhetoric. The party had certainly convinced itself that it was going to sweep the elections and opinion polls had shown Imran Khan was the most popular leader in the country. But elections are contested on the basis of candidates and their local appeal more than the charisma of a party head. And claiming that the votes are a result of fraud because they don’t match opinion polls is not a very convincing argument.

Ascribe the PTI’s August 14 rally to bullheadedness, naivety or something more sinister. But do not use it to doubt that the PML-N deserved its victory. The PTI has boycotted elections and by-elections before because it feared rigging but its true fear seems to be defeat. The realities of governance should have shown the party that nothing is done perfectly in the country – but then the PTI would have to admit that there is no reason for it to maintain the high dudgeon of campaign mode all year round.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. Email: nadir.hassan@gmail.com