Pakistan Election Results 2024: Poll body's new app hits snag as authorities grapple with delays

The Election Commission of Pakistan’s new app designed to help officials tabulate and collate poll results swiftly was hit with major challenges on Friday as authorities have been scrambling to announce the results after a long delay. ECP’s brainchild, Election Management System, was created to transmit results from polling stations to a centralised system where tabulation of all results would take place and Returning Offices would be responsible for the same. However, after the declaration of results was delayed by several hours on 9 February, the ECP’s claim about its app’s purpose of announcing the results without using the internet fell flat. On polling day, the internet was suspended in the entire nation. This snag brought unexpected changes, mainly for Presiding Officers at several polling stations on Thursday evening, who found themselves unable to transmit the final results of their respective stations using the much-touted and homegrown system, the Dawn newspaper reported. This is not the first time one of ECP’s technology has faced a hurdle on its way. In 2018, the ECP’s Result Transmission System (RTS) was clogged when thousands of polling stations began sending results from all parts of the country, causing delays in the announcement of results of some constituencies, which was exploited by the losing parties as an alleged conscious effort to rig the results. The CEC was expected to address a press conference, but instead, Special Secretary Zafar Iqbal appeared on state-run PTV just before 3 am on Friday to announce the first official results from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly. In the brief announcement, he squarely blamed the suspension of internet and mobile phone services for the delay in the compilation and announcement of results. The ECP had claimed that the countrywide test run of EMS had been a ‘success’. With inputs from PTI