The Election Commission of Pakistan’s announced deadline for filing the nomination papers for February 8 elections is finally ended on Sunday.
The process of filing the nomination papers for the national and the provincial assemblies’ seats began on December 20 and was scheduled to end at 4:30 pm on Friday.
However, later on, the ECP has extended the deadline till Sunday. While making the statement on the above mentioned, the ECP said that, “The decision about extension of deadline was taken in response to the requests from the political parties and to facilitate the candidacy process.”
While making the statement, the ECP said that, “Political parties must submit their priority lists for the specific seats to the returning officers within the given period of time.”
Meanwhile, several political leaders including the PML-N’s Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, former mayor of Islamabad Pir Adil Gillani, Sheikh Ansar Aziz, ex-deputy mayors of the federal capital, Zeeshan Naqvi and Chaudhry Riffat Javed among others filed their nomination papers on Sunday.
Many leading political leaders including former Prime Minister and PTI Chief, Imran Khan, former three-times Prime Minister and PML-N Chief, Nawaz Sharif, former President Asif Ali Zardari, former prime ministers Yusuf Raza Gilani, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and Shehbaz Sharif as well as many other influential leaders have submitted their documents.
Notably, the revised list of the candidates will be published on January 11 and the last date for withdrawing one’s candidature is January 12. Moreover, the election symbols will be allotted to the political parties on January 13 with the polls set for February 8.
It is to be hereby added that, the reports in specific has mentioned that, the ECP had decided to postpone the complaints of hearing, which are mainly related to the delimitation, “prioritizing election schedule in line with the Supreme Court’s decision to avoid disruption.”
