Voters’ day to be celebrated on Dec 7

Main focus is to encourage women to get registered

ISLAMABAD: In order to highlight the importance of a vote and to encourage people to register for voting, the top election monitoring body has decided to observe December 7 as the national voters’ day.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Tuesday sent a summery to the Prime Minister House which would then send it to the President for his formal consent to make the event an official national day.

“We want to make sure all eligible citizens get registered as voters before the 2018 general election,” the ECP said in an official statement issued after a meeting at its headquarters.

The ECP plans to hold one main event on the national voters’ day in the Presidency while its provincial chapters would be holding events in the governor houses of all the four provinces.



The ECP in the meeting also decided to hold awareness campaigns at the district level. If approved, the main focus of this year’s national voters’ day would be to encourage women to get registered as voters and turn up to cast their votes.

It is estimated that more than 12.17 million women of 18 years or above – who are otherwise eligible to be registered as voters – are not included in the voters list. The prime reason is that they do not have a Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs) which is needed to enlist them in the electoral lists.

Under the newly passed Elections Act, 2017 if women voting in a constituency would be less than 10% of the total votes, the commission would annul the results and call a re-election for the seat.

There were reports in the previous elections that women in certain constituencies – especially in remote areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkwa and Balochistan – were restrained from voting under covert agreements among political parties or candidates.



The reports suggested that local politicians, workers of political parties, clerics and community leaders had developed an agreement to bar women from voting. Since no male and female segregated data of polled votes was available, it was hard to verify such reports.

As a step to secure women’s right to vote and participate in the election process, parliament – through the newly adopted law – has enhanced the number of offences that come under corrupt practices.

The new law makes it mandatory for the political parties to give at least 5% tickets to female candidates on general seats. This will be in addition to the reserved seats for them in national and provincial legislatures.