The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is currently focused on completing the process of redrawing constituency boundaries without any errors. Therefore, the commission will not be in a hurry to announce the schedule for the general elections. According to sources, it is unlikely that the polling date will be decided anytime soon, or even before the end of this month, as the specific question is not yet on the agenda of the ECP's meetings.
Highly placed sources from the ECP told The News on Wednesday that Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikandar Sultan Raja has been working diligently for weeks to make sure the process of delimitation is undertaken in a way that it can’t be questioned. Committees for supervision of the process have been constituted and committee members have been asked to constitute subordinate committees comprising people whose integrity cannot be questioned. Committee members are also being monitored so that their work is not affected by politics.
According to sources, the recent series of meetings with the political leadership of various parties proved beneficial for the ECP’s process as no noteworthy party had opposed the delimitation. As far as the question of polls in a specific period of time is concerned, though, parties do have divergent views about the timeline. The CEC has told the commission that undue haste will not be exercised during the delimitation process since this is a sensitive issue and provides the basis for the elections.
