ISLAMABAD - At least four leading architects of the country have submitted a complaint to Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)’s Cybercrime Wing, alleging that recent elections of Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners (PCATP) have been stolen through hacking of online voting system.
The complaint has been filed under the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act 2016 by architects including S M Jahangir Khan Sherpao, Azhar M Sualehi, Farman Ullah Khan and Husnain Raza Khan. All these were amongst the contestants for elections of the council, a regulatory body set under the PCATP Ordinance, 1983.
Their opponents include Architect M Arif Changezi, among others, who is also the incumbent chairman of the council.
The counsel for the complainants confirmed over phone that a formal complaint had been filed and the Cybercrime Wing had formally started its initial probe on it.
According to the complaint, a copy of which is available with The Nation, the complainants have reported that on the night between 6 to 7 March, the electronic voting system through which PCATP elections were being conducted got hacked.
Next day, Oathsystems (Pvt) Limited, the IT company entrusted with carrying out on- line elections, submitted a report to the registrar PCATP. The report said that some party orchestrated a hacking attack on the online voting system, and succeeded in manipulating the results, according to the complaint.
“We witnessed an attack on our voting system at around 2am on March 7,” the complaint said while quoting the IT Company’s email sent to the registrar.
“As a result of this attack, our voting result was manipulated… we cannot certify the result,” the email added.
The complainants alleged that incumbent PCATP chairman Changezi, instead of immediately reporting the hacking incident right away to FIA, declared himself and some of his panel members as winners of the election.
They warned that hacking of the online voting system of a major national institution like PCATP is a serious matter which attracts numerous provisions of Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act. This incident has set a bad precedent for electronic voting of all kinds in the country, they added.
