ISLAMABAD: The PTI has called on a foreign observation mission to release its report on the 2024 general elections, claiming that it lays bare “systemic rigging, institutional bias, and deliberate targeting of PTI and its founder, Imran Khan”.
The demand came after a recent report by the independent news outlet Drop Site News claimed that the Commonwealth Observer Group (COG) group had “buried their report” after finding the Feb 8 general elections to be riddled with problems.
Although the group’s report on Pakistan has yet to be officially released, media outlets claimed to have obtained leaked copies of the report.
In a statement issued on Sunday, the COG said it was aware that a version of its report on the 2024 Pakistan general elections was circulating online, adding that they did not comment on leaked documents as a matter of policy.
C’wealth says report shared with govt, ECP;
will be released this month
“The government and the Election Commission of Pakistan have already received the report. The full report, as we had communicated earlier, will be released later this month, along with a number of COG reports currently in the publication pipeline,” the statement said.
The COG also maintained that its work is “carried out free from any interference”.
While announcing its preliminary findings on Feb 10, 2024, the COG had said that its findings and recommendations would be submitted to the Commonwealth secretary general, before being shared with the Pakistani government, and shared publicly.
The mission’s report has faced an inordinate delay, as most observation missions compile their findings and publish them within days or weeks of their compilation.
According to an excerpt from the leaked copy — whose authenticity could not be independently verified by Dawn — the report stated that: “Despite the fact that early vote counts indicated a landslide victory for candidates aligned with… the banned PTI… saw their polling leads rapidly reversed…”
In a statement issued on Sunday, PTI Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqqas Akram said the leaked report validated PTI’s longstanding reservations about widespread pre- and post-poll rigging.
Zulfi Bukhari, a former aide to ex-PM Imran Khan, also raised questions about why the report was never released.
“Tomorrow, I will be consulting legal counsel to initiate proceedings aimed at securing disclosure, both of the report itself in full and of the decision-making processes that led to its suppression,” he wrote on X.
