The Senate Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, in its meeting on Tuesday, called for the general elections to be held within the 90-day constitutional timeframe. The recommendation comes days after the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) announced that polls in the country would be held in January next year. However, the timeframe lacks a specific date for the elections. It also exceeds the Nov 6 cut-off date suggested by President Arif Alvi considering the 90-day limit. Since the National Assembly was dissolved three days before the end of its constitutional term, Article 224 of the Constitution mandates that elections be held within 90 days of the dissolution of the assembly by November 7. Today, the committee also expressed its reservations over the process of compiling the results during the elections, demanding that the result management be made clearer. It urged the ECP to restrict the election process and immediately announce the election schedule. Meanwhile, ECP Secretary Omar Hamid Khan assured the Senate committee that the commission was \u201cproviding everyone with a level playing field\u201d for the upcoming polls. During a briefing to the committee, he asserted that there \u201cwould not be any rigging in the upcoming general elections\u201d as the arrangements the ECP was making would have \u201cno chance of rigging\u201d. Khan went on to state that the electoral body has \u201cno favourite\u201d, adding: \u201cA lot has happened with us, which we have kept behind the curtains.\u201d He told the committee, \u201cProvincial governments were not ready but we still conducted the local government polls. We are making sure that the mistakes made by the ECP in past are not repeated.\u201d The official\u2019s assurance echoes the ECP\u2019s promise made a month ago that transparent polls would be conducted in the country \u201cas soon as possible\u201d and a level playing field would be provided to all political parties. However, soon, strong statements were made by several senior PPP leaders, including party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, over the past month against the \u201cabsence of a level playing field\u201d. The PPP has also termed the current caretaker setup as an extension of the PML-N, citing the induction of bureaucrats who have been closely affiliated with the Nawaz-led party. Similar concerns have been raised by the PTI as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Senate Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, in its meeting on Tuesday, called for the general elections to be held within the 90-day constitutional timeframe….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9948,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}