ISLAMABAD: The first phase of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf intra-party elections in Islamabad slated for November 02 is most likely to be delayed yet again after several party veterans at a meeting aired strong reservations over what they alleged as pre-poll rigging.
An insider revealed to The News here Tuesday night that some party activists even approached Imran Khan and the party’s chief election commissioner Hamid Khan for deletion of bogus voters from the lists prior to going for the exercise.
Two groups - Dream Team and Shaheen Group - are to contest for party slots in Islamabad’s 42 union councils. In this connection, a meeting here at PTI’s Central Secretariat saw a heated exchange of arguments among the participants about presence of thousands of bogus names in voter lists. “I have no information that the poll has been delayed,” remarked PTI’s information secretary Shafqat Mehmood, when this correspondent approached him on telephone. A similar reply was received from the party’s election commission secretary Raoof Hasan, when contacted on phone. Hasan said they were fully prepared to conduct the election in a fair and transparent manner and had no information about postponement of the same.
It was learnt that an Islamabad central office-bearer was trying to influence the proposed poll, as he wanted to see persons of his choice elected from the local district. “In each union council’s voter lists, there are 300 bogus voters, having affiliation with this particular group, which comprises mostly new faces,” a diehard PTI worker claimed while talking to this correspondent.
