ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan filed a follow-up appeal on Friday to his previous petition seeking removal of bogus votes from voter lists and asked that the by-elections scheduled for February 25 be stopped.
In his civil miscellaneous appeal filed in the apex court through advocate Hamid Khan, the PTI chief accused the Election Commission of Pakistan of holding by-elections without correcting the current voter lists.
Earlier, the ECP had stated that the deadline given by the Supreme Court to purge the lists of bogus votes by February 23, 2012 was ‘not humanly impossible’, and had sought assistance from political parties for extension of the deadline.
Hamid Khan told The Express Tribune that the new appeal was submitted because the ECP was conducting elections on the same date, despite the court’s orders to correct the voter lists. The Supreme Court, while hearing Khan’s earlier petition, had observed that elections cannot be conducted based on the old electoral lists.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had remarked that the previous lists had over 30 million bogus votes which could not be verified.
“We have challenged the January 27 notification of the ECP to hold by-election on 25th of this month and asked the court to restrain the ECP from holding by-elections on the basis of polluted voter lists,” Hamid Khan said.
Khan held that the ECP was going to hold elections in defiance of the apex court’s January 19 order whereby the ECP was restrained from holding by-elections on the basis of polluted voter lists having as many as 37,185,998 unverified votes.
In a related development, television anchorperson Mubasher Lucman filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking postponement of the upcoming Senate election.
Barrister Ali Zafar, the counsel for Lucman, held in his petition that 70 members of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies are fake degree holders and their cases are pending before different accountability forums. The petition argued that the ECP held 29 by-elections on the basis of fake voter lists contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The upcoming election of the upper house of Parliament should not be held until the fate of these 100 members is decided, according to the petitioner.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 4th, 2012.