Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday said the "status quo" was against the electronic voting machines (EVMs) to "manipulate elections through getting opposition votes rejected".
The premier shared a post about the first phase of the local government elections in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) that showed the number of rejected votes in the local polls was greater than the winning margin.
As per the infographic shared by the premier, the rejected votes were over 23,000 while the winning margin was about 12,000.
LG elections in KP have again shown problem of rejected votes bec of double stamping etc. The same had come out in Judicial Commission report on 2013 elections. The ability to manipulate elections through getting opp votes rejected is one of the reasons the status quo opposes EVM pic.twitter.com/ch78zPEGQw
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) February 16, 2022
Imran said the issue of rejected votes had been pointed out by a judicial commission formed to probe the alleged irregularities in the 2013 elections and the issue has surfaced again in the K-P LG polls.
Read ECP resists ‘tactics to pressurise it on EVMs’
Last month, Science and Technology Minister Shibli Faraz, however, had said that the EVMs were not designed for local government elections.
Faraz had said that there were multiple panels in the local bodies’ elections and the machines do not yet support multiple panels. In the general elections, he had added, only a single panel is required in EVMs even if 200 candidates were contesting from a single constituency.
Despite reservations expressed by the opposition parties and the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), the government had bulldozed the EVMs bill in the parliament last year.
The government claimed that these machines will ensure transparent polls while the opposition expressed concerns over potential rigging through EVMs.