'Fair Election Network' proposes electoral reforms

A set of 33 recommendations, directed towards the government/parliament, Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), political parties and candidates, as well as citizens and media were released by 'Free And Fair Election Network' (Fafen) at a hotel here on Monday.
'Fafen' is a coalition of 30 leading Pakistani civil society organisations, established in 2006 to observe election processes, educate voters, and advocate for electoral and democratic reforms.
It urged the ECP to establish a mandatory procedure for publishing election result from each polling station recorded on ECP Form XVI (Consolidation statement of the results of the count furnished by the presiding officers) before publishing official results in the gazette.
It proposed that ECP should ban announcement of results for constituencies with more than 100 percent voter turnout in any polling station (votes polled exceeding registered voters) or where women are prevented from voting in any polling station. Either the vote counts from those polling stations should be excluded from the compilation of the official result or re-polling should take place in those stations, it said.
Fafen also recommended reforming the election law so that all polling stations should be combined (male and female stations), rather than all-female or all-male polling stations, as women tend to turn out in greater numbers at combined polling stations as compared to all-female polling stations. Further, it recommended to amend the constitution to ban candidates from running for office in more than one constituency.
It urged that a parliamentary committee on electoral reforms must be established to consolidate, clarify, and improve upon the electoral laws, to ensure independent functioning of the ECP, and to eliminate local government and caretaker set-up interference in elections.
The parliamentary committee should conduct public hearings to allow for consultation with stakeholders, and should ensure that election-related laws and codes of conduct include enforcement mechanisms, it demanded.
Any reform for the code of conduct for political parties and contesting candidates, Fafen said, should be carried out in full consultation with all relevant stakeholders, adding clear enforcement mechanisms. The code should ban the common, inappropriate use of state resources of all kinds in advance of elections, and should ensure tracking and enforcement of violations of the code as well as election spending limits by contesting candidates.
It also stressed the need for all election-related laws and codes to be enforced on Election Day. These recommendations have been presented to the election reforms committee of the ECP and are documented in three Fafen election results analysis reports, three Fafen preliminary statements immediately on and following election day, 19 Fafen election updates and a dozen other pre-election publications.