Voting begins in National Assembly to elect speaker, deputy speaker

Voting for the position of National Assembly speaker and deputy speaker commenced on Wednesday morning at the Parliament House.

The session is being attended by the newly-elected members of NA, which includes several lawmakers from different parties. The session is being presided by outgoing NA Speaker Ayaz Sadiq.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has fielded former speaker of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Assembly Asad Qaiser, while the opposition has nominated Pakistan Peoples Party's (PPP) Khursheed Shah for the post of NA speaker.

For the slot of deputy speaker of NA, PTI has nominated Qasim Suri, whereas Asad Mahmood of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) has been fielded by the opposition.

For the selection of both the designations, members of the NA will be voting for their respective candidates through secret ballot. After the polling concludes, the speaker will announce the result and administer oath to the new speaker.

On Monday, speaker Sadiq administered oath to 328 members of the National Assembly in the first session of the newly-elected MNAs. The lower house of the parliament has a total of 342 seats, including 272 general seats, 60 reserved for women and 10 for minorities.

Oath ceremony was also held at the provincial assemblies of Sindh, Balochistan and KP on Monday, where new-elected members of the provincial assemblies were sworn in.