ISLAMABAD – NADRA has broken silence over the issue of the failure of theResult Management System on fateful night of July 25.
The Result Transmission System (RTS) developed by the National Database andRegistration Authority (Nadra) never failed during the 2018 generalelection, claimed the authority on Friday.
The government had formed an investigating committee headed by the PakistanTehreek-e-Insaf parliamentary leader in the Senate Azam Swati to look intothe RTS fault. The committee was also tasked with identifying thoseresponsible and to suggest action against them.
Nadra in response to Swati’s question maintained that the RTS did not failmoreover it also ensured that it was not possible for any presiding officerto change or tamper with the actual results due to its malfunctioning.
It also claimed that ECP had administrative control of RTS to handleoperation including user management, candidates’ addition, and deletion andediting, constituencies and polling scheme management and deviceregistration while Nadra was providing technical hosting services forbackend system, the authority stated further in response to anotherquestion asked by Senator Swati.
According to the RTS log, submitted to the standing committee on Interior,the mobile application was receiving results of different polling stationsright from 6pm of June 25 on the day of election till July 27 when resultswere concluded. During the 44 hours, according to the log during each hourthe application had been getting information from different pollingstations.
The RTS was designed to upload the picture of Form 45 by presiding officersvia mobile devices which were then supposed to be transmitted to the serverof the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
According to the RTS data, the application first received information ofForm 45 of 17 polling stations which an hour later swelled to that of 225polling stations. At 11pm, the application got maximum traffic which wasrecorded at 15,796. The log further revealed that at 6am on July 26 itreceived information from 1,007 polling stations and after this period,there was a gradual drop in the data received.
Perhaps it was the time when the ECP internally had admitted of facing‘big’ issues with the system and asked concerned authorities if theapplication was not functioning than the presiding officers should directlysubmit the forms to the ROs.
Furthermore, during the session it was also determined that two types ofsoftware were used by the ECP during the election— Result Management System(RMS) and the RTS.