Pakistan cancels poll result after women barred from voting

Pakistani women gather around the presiding officers of a local election body in Peshawar on May 30, 2015. Female election turnout is usually weak in the most conservative, rural parts of Pakistan. -AFP

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s election commission has cancelled the result of a local poll in the country’s restive northwest after women were barred from casting their ballots.

A by-election on May 7 in Lower Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan’s deeply conservative northwestern province, was won by a member of the Islamist Jamat-e-Islami (JI) party, but it emerged that women in the area had been prevented from voting.