Electoral Rolls: ECP to start door-to-door verification from August 8

19 Jul, 2011

Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has decided to start country wide door-to-door verification exercise of Electoral Rolls from August 8.
This was decided in a meeting of ECP officials with Chairman National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) Ali Arshad Hakeem and Secretary Statistics Division the other day.
The chairman NADRA informed about some practical problems, which hindered the gigantic task of printing of more than 80 million voters detail in the Draft Electoral Rolls in time and requested for revision of timelines earlier decided by the Election Commission.
Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has delayed the verification process considering the historic nature of this time-taking electoral exercise, the law and order situation in some parts of the country, the forthcoming holy month of Ramadan and Eid holidays.
An official of ECP informed APP that the verification process, which was earlier decided to start from July 18, would now start from August 8 and complete till September 17.
Around 124,000 numeration staff, which is being imparted training by ECP, will conduct verification at the newly devised 145,000 census blocks across the country with the efforts of Census Organisations.
The teams will complete the verification process in their respective census blocks till September 17 and submit data to the ECP.
Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) will finalise the electoral rolls with the help of data of over 80 million adult population (91 percent of the total population) to be provided by National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and the voter lists made in 2007.
The teams will go door-to-door and get a form filled from a family to update and verify the information. The form will be signed by the head of family.
The final voters' list will be displayed for 21 days in October at different locations across the country so that the citizens can check their names and complain about any error, objection, correction.
A tribunal will be made to address the complaints of the citizens after displaying the final voters list which will issue notices to both the respondent and the petitioner.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) with the help of NADRA is making a transparent database and the CNIC number would be used as a unique identifier for the existing voters' list to discourage the trend of fake voting and to avoid double entry.
The form to be filled by a citizen will have a separate box for the information about the constituency with which he belongs. And if a person changes his location he will be supposed to submit an application for deleting his name from that constituency and move toward other.
It is for the first time in the history of Pakistan that such electoral rolls database is going to be made which will eliminate all possibility of double and bogus voter lists.

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