CEC Raja leaves for Brazil for EVM briefing

ISLAMABAD: Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) Chief Sikandar Sultan Raja on Monday departed on an official visit to Brazil where he will receive a briefing on the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), ARY News reported.

He was accompanied by the director general of Information Technology (IT) on a two-day visit. They will receive a briefing on the EVM.

Meanwhile, sources said that CEC Sikandar Sultan Raja will prolong his stay in the country and will return to Pakistan on April 20.

It is pertinent to mention that the ECP chief was scheduled to visit Brazil last year, however, the visit faced postponement twice.

In the past, the ECP had objected to hold the February 8 election through EVM and declared them as convenient vehicles for electoral malpractices and fraud.

The electoral body, in 2021 had pointed out as many as 37 objections to the functionality of EVM and declared it to be totally unfit for the task that it is going to be used for.

Read more: NA approves amendments to Elections Act; scraps use of EVMs

Later, the PML-N led coalition government approved legislation in the National Assembly to remove the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in the general elections.

The bill was moved by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Murtaza Javed Abbasi on May 26, 2022, and was passed with a majority vote.

Then Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar said that the coalition government was not against the use of EVM in the next general elections.

However, he said that his party had concerns about misuse of technology as the Results Transmission System (RTS) had failed in the 2018 elections.

He went on to say that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had also expressed its inability to hold elections through I-Voting and EVMs in a short span of time.