Parliamentarian M P Bhandara has advised the Election Commission (EC) to file a petition in the Supreme Court seeking review of the court's order that the electoral rolls prepared in 2002 be compared with Draft Electoral Rolls of 2007, allowing the enrolment of voters left out.
He made the suggestion after Kanwar Dilshad, Secretary, Election Commission, told a meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, that his organisation (EC) had compiled the list following the Supreme Court order, and voters left out in the Draft Electoral Rolls 2007 will be included as additional list for use during the general election.
Riaz Fatyana, presided over the meeting held in the Parliament House, here on Wednesday. Bhandara felt strongly that the amalgamation of the two election rolls would create enormous confusion, with the names of persons who may have died since the preparation of the Electoral Rolls, 2002.
In view of the duplication and other anomalies there was a danger that 'opposition parties might declare the election as stolen.' He sounded warning that due to duplication of names the country might experience a worse mess than what Bangladesh had experienced recently.
Therefore, the EC should send a petition to the Supreme Court seeking review of the Apex Court's previous order and inform the Court of his fear to forestall protests that would come up after the election is held on the basis of two Electoral Rolls.
The Parliament must make a proper law on this subject and the Supreme Court (SC) will interpret it, Bhandara remarked. Secretary EC also responded to a number of enquiries from Committee Members, Bushra Rahman, Sayda Farhana, Khalid Banoori, Nafisa Munawar Raja, Nawab Mirza, Safdar Warraich and M P Bhandara.
The Nadra services could not be used for preparing computerised electoral rolls because not only that Nadra was found to be faulty since Nadra did not undertake door to door enumeration and, besides, Nadra Ordinance, 2000 prohibits them to share any sort of NIC database with any department.
As for entrusting the preparation of Electoral Rolls to Messrs Kalsoft at a cost of Rs 500 million, Kanwar Dilshad replied that a tender was floated in newspapers after a very comprehensive TOR and the technical evaluation was done by a large committee comprising representatives of the ECP, UNDP, Pakistan Computer Bureau, IT Ministry US-AID and International Foundation for Electoral System (IFES).
However, the EC had no plans that it should ask Nadra to verify CNIC numbers of voters. Kanwar Dilshad also stated that it was correct that there were 71.86 million voters in the Electoral Rolls used in the 2002 General Election based on Census Data Forms, the NIC or CNIC of voters were not mentioned. It was decided by the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) to prepare a fresh Electoral Roll after door to door enumeration.
He said that new names of those attaining the age of 18 would be added in the electoral list till the date of Election is announced, and the addition would be possible after showing confirmatory documents about the age and place of residence. In response to a question, the EC responded that for lack of infrastructure they had no plan yet of introducing computerised voting in selected urban communities but they might consider a future pilot project.