The AFC, having deliberated on the PPP’s recommended changes to the Representation of People Act, has become even more non-supportive and suspicious of the purport and content of the amendments.
The Party maintains that the unilateral and stealthy nature of these amendments reveal, like other developments since its installation into office, a further removal by the PPP Government from meaningful consultation and participation on serious matters such as electoral reform. This biased, subjectivist process has poisoned these amendments beyond acceptance.
To have excluded the recently hailed Law Reform Commission from even taking a cursory examination of these proposed changes is excising from this important independent advisorial institution, one of its core functions. To have excluded GECOM, the institution most immediate to the operations of elections, the actual stakeholder, is a huge false start.
The AFC asserts that the amendments to subdivide Election District 4 into four separate legislatively configured districts, rather than maintaining them as administratively arranged districts at the discretion of GECOM, is an erosion of the administrative power given by the Constitution to that body which superintends our elections. It is a sinister transferral of that power by the PPP. It violates our constitutional norms and conventions just like we see happening in the presiding of matters national by Bharat Jagdeo which is a violation of the conventions and norms of a Presidential two-term limit.
The alleged pretext of increased efficiency of getting results within the four separate sub-districts faster, is hollow. Apart from the need for speed in getting results, the defect to be cured consequent upon what happened last elections is to make sure of the fairness and validity of the process. This seemed not to be a bother of the authors behind these amendments. This the AFC treats with grave suspicion.
The AFC sees the draconian penalties of $10,000,000.00 (ten million dollars) fine and ten years to life imprisonment for certain offences as well as wholly with the purpose to deter employment and drive fear inthe conducting of duties of elections officials. Human errors will happen. Though these can be corrected by an internal superintendence, an official can now suffer severe penalties. These draconian penalties, knowing the PPP, will also see a discriminatory application of who will be charged and prosecuted.
The AFC does not see these amendments as a genuine, honest response to the problems which exist and which ought to be cured. It sees these amendments as a platform for PPP to take off in a full course of gerrymandering of District 4 to its advantage.
It urges a restart of the process with all participants and stakeholders playing their roles and having their say from a drafting stage to completion stage with the help from experts who should be hired by the Law Reform Commission or can be from international/regional centres.
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