Election officials count votes in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, on July 25, 2018. (Xinhua/Ahmad Kamal)
ISLAMABAD, July 26 (Xinhua) -- The outcome of the results of Pakistan's general elections has been slowed down due to failure of Result Transfer System (RTS), the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) said in capital Islamabad on early Thursday morning.
The RTS is an online software designated to transfer the votes' counting from polling stations to the election headquarters.
Sardar Muhammad Raza Khan, the Chief Election Commissioner of Pakistan, told media that the RTS crashed when tens of thousands of polling officers started transferring results simultaneously from different polling stations across the country after completing the counting of votes on Wednesday evening.
Following the technical failure of the system, ECP advised all the polling officers to transfer the results to district control rooms manually. However, the rainy season and polling stations being in far flung areas are causing the further delay to compile the final results.
The polling started at 8:00 a.m. local time on Wednesday and continued uninterrupted up to 6:00 p.m. local time.
Out of the 272 seats of the National Assembly, the lower house of the country's parliament, elections took place on 270 seats as elections were postponed on two seats due to death and disqualification of the candidates.
According to the preliminary data released by the ECP, after receiving the results of 30 percent of the total 85,000 polling stations, Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI), led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, is leading in the country's general elections.
The PTI is leading in 108 National Assembly seats than the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which are leading in 59 and 38 seats, respectively, the ECP data said. The election body said it will start announcing the official results after receiving the complete vote count.
