KARACHI: Just a day after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held out the assurance that the next general elections would be held on the basis of fresh census and that problems in electoral rolls of Sindh`s urban areas would be looked into, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) on Thursday claimed to have handed over `evidence of flaws and anomalies` in Karachi`s voter lists to the Election Commission of Pakistan.

The party has claimed that about 30 per cent of more than eight million votes had been shifted from their original constituencies to other areas.An MQM-P delegation led by senior party leader Dr Farooq Sattar held a detailed meeting with E CP officials in Islamabad and discussed with them his party`s apprehensions regarding the alleged flaws in voter lists.

The ECP was also informed about the alleged biased attitude of the Provincial Election Commission (Sindh) which, it said, `has damaged prospects of a free and free election in Sindh by conniving with the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party`.

The MQM-P delegation that included MNA Abu Bakar, apprised the ECP officials of the party`s efforts towards ensuring a free and fair census that led to the enlistment of 5.6 million more Karachiites in the process after they were left out in the initial phase of the census.

Later talking to journalists, Farooq Sattar appeared optimistic about his party`s overall efforts towards convincing the federal govern-ment and ECP to ensure that the next general elections were held on the basis of fresh census and that the flaws in the voter lists, mainly of Karachi, were fixed.

`We held a detailed meeting with the ECP and we showed them that why the entire process of finalising voter lists of Karachi is questionable,` he said.

`We have gathered the data and reached out to every single voter in Karachi which led to the final figures that showed that votes of some 30 per cent people of total registered voters in Karachi have been shifted from their original constituencies to other places. We have handed over all documents and evidence to the ECP so that it could verify this with their sources and countercheck our claims.

He accused the PPP of using the Sindh ECP for `prepoll rigging` so as to `manipulate`the votingprocessin the next general elections in Karachi.The MQM-P leader claimed that the PPP could never win any mandate through free and fair polls.

He said areas of constituencies of a large number of Karachi voters had been changed without any valid reason or priornotice.

In severalcases even the city and province Karachi voters were changed showing a `serious and deliberate engineering` behind the exercise months before the next general elections, he added.

`We met Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif yesterday [Wednesday] and today we held a meeting with the ECP,` said Dr Sattar. `We have done our job and we hope that the two offices PM House and the ECP will do their work and would not allow anyone to steal the mandate of Karachi through maneuvering and engineering. We welcome the assurances from both sides and look forward that the same would translate into action.