ISLAMABAD: The much-anticipated general election this year expected to be based on the delimitation exercise. That was done in August of last year and made public.
The government plans to give a report to the Council of Common Interests (CCI) by July 31. The post-enumeration poll set to begin on July 8.
The first digital census of the country started in March of this year. But it’s not clear when the results will be made public because there are still some steps to finish.
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), have started making plans for seat changes in the upcoming elections. Even though the exact date of the elections is still unknown.
“Frankly, there haven’t been any pointless discussions about the next general election in the past few weeks,” a federal minister who didn’t want to be quoted said when asked him about the matter. “The official position is that the country will go to the polls in October.”
He stressed that the coalition government would not break the law in any way during the nationwide election. It would happy even if the elections held according to the delimitation from the last time.
In their comments, however, some other cabinet members said that the general election would held after a new delimitation. Which would mean that the elections would be held later than planned.
ECP
When asked, a senior member of the ECP said he didn’t think elections could held on time. In the first week of October and before the 12th of that month, if constituencies drawn up based on the digital census.
“The delimitation process takes four months. He added that it’s likely that the delimitation from last year will be used.
The ECP official said that Article 51(5) of the Constitution and Section 17(2) of the Elections Act, 2017, said that the final published data needed for delimitation of constituencies, and the commission had to start delimitation of constituencies after the census results made public.
But he said that a constitutional change would have to be made after the official release of census data.
So, he said, given the current situation and how things look, the commission would have no choice but to hold the next general election based on the results of the last delimitation.
