KARACHI: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) took a step in the right direction by organising the National Voters Day on October 17. However, the ECP ought to undertake a number of measures if there has to be any significant difference between its past and future performances. The minimum actions necessary to avoid the kind of fiascos that took place in the past would be as follows:
1) The ECP conducted the 2008 elections with 37 million fake votes and also failed to check around 200 fake degree holders and around 80 to 100 dual nationals. They duped the system and became our legislators. The ECP should institute an accountability process that can punish its officials concerned for their negligence or complicity. If the ECP fails to do so, one should safely assume that it does not understand the damage it caused last time and is, therefore, likely to repeat its mistakes again.
2) The ECP has so far failed to investigate the true number of those parliamentarians, who fall in the above two categories, nor has it disqualified any of them on its own. This indicates that the ECP may be willing to tolerate such deceptions in the next elections.
3) The ECP’s exercise of making fresh electoral lists is totally redundant and uncalled for. In doing so, it has already introduced more errors. All they need to do is to refrain from making fresh lists and to accept NADRA’s list of CNIC holders as the master list of voters. From this list, it should remove the names of those who have expired.
4) The ECP voter registration and information correction process is outdated, cumbersome and impractical. It should create an SMS telephonic process (similar to the 8300 SMS verification) to make these changes. This assumes that a few questions like the ones used for visa cards would be asked for validation purposes.
5) The current address mentioned in CNICs should be the default voting address of all voters, unless he/she specifically requests for a change to the permanent address.
6) Polling booths must not be established in areas that are a stronghold of any one tribe, a baithak or haveli of a wadera or stronghold of a political party. Clearly, these places do not welcome ‘outsiders’ and are extremely vulnerable to rigging. Many polling booths must be co-located in large open grounds where they are accessible to all (without fear) and can be more accurately monitored.
Naeem Sadiq
Published in The Express Tribune, October 20th, 2012.
