After an outage of a few hours, the ‘Form 47’ section on the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) website was back up online.
It had earlier been inaccessible, and was independently confirmed by Business Recorder.
The ECP also did not communicate a reason for the outage.
Upon clicking on the ‘Form-47 Provisional Results Dashboard’ on the ECP’s website (ecp.gov.pk), the page showed a ‘404 error’, which appears when a server cannot find a user-requested webpage.
The development comes after the electoral watchdog was criticised for delaying election results.
Earlier during the day, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) General Secretary Omar Ayub had claimed that Form 47 of 18 National Assembly (NA) seats allegedly won by PTI-backed independent candidates in Karachi were “falsely changed” by returning officers (RO).
“These seats have been won by PTI. The mandate given by the people of Karachi to PTI is being stolen by these corrupt, spineless bureaucrats,” he said in a post on X.
“The people of Karachi had rejected MQM but the ‘Bhatta’ culture will soon start once again. The anarchy of MQM is being reintroduced into Karachi. It does not bode well for Karachi or Pakistan,” he added.
On Friday, the Lahore High Court (LHC) barred the ECP from issuing results for Lahore’s NA-128 constituency, after PTI-backed candidate Salman Akram Raja moved the LHC against the alleged anomaly.
During the hearing, Raja’s counsel Barrister Sameer Khosa argued that his client, who according to the results compiled from Form 45 had taken a decisive lead, was declared runner-up in Form 47.
He added that Salman Akram Raja was present at the Returning Officer’s (RO) office; however, he was not allowed to exercise his legal right to observe the vote-count process.
Hearing the petition, Justice Baqir Najafi summoned the RO of the concerned constituency, but the court was informed that he had mysteriously “gone missing.”
After his argument, the court issued an interim order, barring the electoral watchdog from implementing results based on Form 47.