The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) did not address concerns expressed by Senate's Special Committee on Election on the likelihood of bogus votes in the final electoral votes for upcoming May 11 general elections. In its report, the Senate panel recommended that the ECP should take steps against those Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC) holders whose cards were issued prior to 2005 which are without biometric data. This may well lead to casting of bogus votes.
In another recommendation, the Committee stated that in Punjab and elsewhere a large number of deceased voters are still on the rolls and there is no mechanism to remove as many as 15 million such voters from the rolls. The ECP has yet to write to provincial governments requesting them to direct union councils to provide regular information to the ECP on deceased voters, an official of ECP said.
According to data compiled by NADRA, it has filtered data of 987,285 deceased persons so far from the list as secretary union council transmits only such names that are reported to him by the family of the deceased. Political parties are also concerned that election symbols allotted to political parties were not unique and may cause confusion among the voters.
The committee's report noted that 163,059 voters from Balochistan could not be verified and more than 50 percent of such voters were Afghan/Persian descent and arrived in Pakistan during elections. The issue of nationality was also evident during the distribution of Watan cards under Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and Citizen Damage Compensation (USAID) for 2010 flood victims in Balochistan.
Election experts believe though the Commission and NADRA have taken enough steps to discourage bogus votes to be cast in general elections but add that it is too early to say anything further at this point. They believe that there would be some new way of casting bogus votes that they are currently not even aware of and it would come to the knowledge of ECP only after the elections. Former Secretary ECP Hassan Mohammad said the chances of polling of bogus votes are however minimised but acknowledged that people/parties would cast bogus votes.
ECP with the assistance of NADRA, for the first time in the country's history has managed to include pictures of each and every voter on all computerised electoral rolls. This step was taken in light of criticism by a number of political parties and civil society organisations regarding various discrepancies in electoral rolls due to fake, multiple or duplicate entries.
NADRA has achieved more than 90 percent registration of the population, landmark legislation was passed according to which, in order to be eligible to vote, every individual must possess a CNIC. Once NADRA took control of the production of national electoral rolls for the 2013 elections previous electoral rolls were compared with the national database. Over 37 million voters were identified as unverified from the preceding electoral rolls, while around 45 percent of the total of 82 million voters was deemed as dubious. This includes around 2.5 million duplicate entries, 1.2 million fake entries and a number of deceased. A number of steps were taken for the preparation of electoral rolls in 2012 in order to improve accuracy and ensure transparency for the upcoming elections.
NADRA and ECP have been working closely together sorting out discrepancies found in the previous voter's lists. NADRA currently holds one of the world's largest citizen's biometric database which ECP used as a baseline to carry out door-to-door verification. Previously, electoral rolls were prepared only through door-to-door enumeration and there was an absence of any authentic data to back the process up. The process was divided into three modules. Data of 81.2 million compiled during preparation of previous electoral rolls was transferred to NADRA for verification by ECP.
All such records which were not backed with a CNIC were removed as CNIC was declared to be a pre-requisite for registration as a voter. As a consequence of this, 37 million unverified voters were identified in the previous voters' list, which were sorted out and all duplicate and fake entries were removed.
Comments
Comments are closed.