Rigging, no rigging

Local and international election observers have arrived at a consensus view that May 11 elections were free and fair, sans a few irregularities.
Chiming with Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ibrahim’s view of free and fair elections, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that it “did not find any credible evidence of large-scale or systematic rigging in the country.” The HRCP concluded that those who are protesting should learn to respect the people’s mandate.
The EU Election Observation Mission (EOM) acknowledged in its preliminary report that it had “undertook limited observation” in Karachi, “during which they saw some serious problems in polling and were also restricted in their activities.” Yet, the EU EOM gave a clean chit on the whole by titling their report, “A competitive and improved election process in Pakistan despite militant violence and procedural shortcoming”.
The Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen), whose observers are accredited by the Election Commission of Pakistan, reported an impossible voter turnout of more than 100 percent “in at least 49 polling stations out of 8,119 polling stations sampled by Fafen across Pakistan.”
Fafen’s Chief Executive Mudassir Rizvi, however, concludes that the election was “considerably fair”, highlighting that irregularities were reported in only 0.6 percent of the observed sample of 8,000 plus polling stations.
Talking to BR Research, Rizvi said alleged rigging was at minimal level, and may not necessarily affect the net result of the constituencies. He added that perhaps the ECP could consider re-polling in those countrywide polling stations where voter turnout was more than 80-90 percent and where re-polling could lead to a possible change in results.
But in a well functioning democracy it is not only the results that matter. Party leaders and voters alike need to know how their party performed and whether their party won or lost by a small margin or a big one. High margins of victory and low margins of loss give the much-needed comfort to winners and losers, respectively.
Information pertaining to margin of victory or loss is important because, conceptually, it helps parties to strategise their voter-specific priorities and accordingly ensure better delivery of governance in their respective constituencies.
This kind of information becomes even more important in this year’s elections because the demography (the youth bulge) is very different from that seen in the previous elections. Comparing 2013 poll patterns with that of previous elections would be akin to conducting trend analysis of pre-crash and post-crash prices at the stock market. There is something called the regime change; observers and critics would do well to keep this factor in mind.
It is also pertinent to highlight that the protests by different political parties are not against “large scale rigging”. It’s about alleged rigging in select constituencies, which may be small in number but hold paramount significance in a politically fragmented environment of neck-to-neck competition.