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Islamabad: Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has filed a complaint over what she alleged was the exclusion of millions of people from electoral rolls.
Any election held on the basis of the curtailed lists would be unacceptable, Bhutto said even as the country is braced for a general election around the end of the year.
Bhutto, who has lived in self-exile for nearly a decade, filed a petition with the Supreme Court in Lahore. "It is an institutionalised fraud in the electoral process," her lawyer, Mohammad Latif Khan Khosa, told Reuters.
President Musharraf is under growing domestic and international pressure to ensure a fair electoral exercise in view of widespread allegations of rigging in the 2002 vote.
Bhutto stated in her petition that the electoral process "would not be acceptable to the people of Pakistan" if polls were conducted using the electoral rolls.
"Such a fraud perpetrated would endanger the very federation and be detrimental to the interest of Pakistan," she said.
Electoral lists fanned controversy earlier this month after election officials announced that there would be an estimated 60 million eligible voters in the forthcoming election, about 12 million fewer than in 2002.
They said the state-run National Database and Registration Authority had erred in preparing electoral lists for the 2002 vote by registering many people who did not have national identity cards.
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