Pakistan official admits involvement in rigging election results

Pakistan’s election commission will ‘hold an enquiry’ after Rawalpindi commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha’s announcement.

A senior bureaucrat in Pakistan has said he helped rig Pakistan’s elections, a week after polls marred by allegations of manipulation returned no clear winner.

On Saturday, Liaqat Ali Chattha, commissioner of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the country’s powerful military has its headquarters, said he would hand himself over to police and step down from his position.

“We converted the losers into winners, reversing margins of 70,000 votes in 13 national assembly seats,” he told reporters, also implicating the head of the election commission and the country’s top judge.

According to Pakistan’s Dawn News, the commissioner admitted he was “deeply involved in serious crime like mega election rigging 2024” and said that “stabbing the country in its back” does not allow him sleep.

“I should be punished for the injustice I have done and others who were involved in this injustice should also be punished,” he added.

After Chattha’s announcement, Rawalpindi senior superintendent of police operations, Kamran Asghar, told Dawn the commissioner had not been arrested as no case was filed against him.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s election commission rejected Chattha’s allegations, but said in a statement that it would “hold an enquiry”.

In a news release, the electoral watchdog also said none of its officials ever issued any instructions to Chattha for a “change in the election results”.