ECP counts 125.96m voters till May 31

Male, female difference stands at 54.02%, 45.98% respectively

ISLAMABAD:

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in its latest report had disclosed that the number of registered voters in the country had reached around 125.96 million, saying the figure was counted up till May 31 this year.

According to the statistics, the number of registered male voters stands at around 68.04 million. The men counted so far make up 54.02% of the total registered voters.

As per the ECP data, the number of female registered voters comes to nearly 57.91 million. According to this figure, women account for 45.98% of the total registered voters.

In terms of provinces, Punjab leads with a population of 71.61 million registered voters. The province in second place is Sindh, where the number of registered voters stands at 26.49 million.

In third place is Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where around 21.58 million registered voters have been counted.

Balochistan only has about 5.26 million eligible voters.

The country’s federal capital, Islamabad, has 1.03 million registered voters. The 7th Housing and Population Census is the first one to be conducted digitally in the country’s history.

Officials higher up in the hierarchy of Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the department responsible for conducting the census in the country, confessed to the Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity that large chunks of the population living in some 38,000 high-rise buildings of Karachi had not been counted properly.

“In various apartment complexes enumerators have only managed to count people up until the second floor of the building,” said a PBS official.

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The official blamed the assistant and deputy commissioners of the province, along with the enumerators, for the counting discrepancies and lethargy in the census process. “If there was an actual check on enumerators by the district administration, then about 190,000 people would be counted daily but only 70,000 to 90,000 people are being counted every day,” the official regretted.

Various supervisors of the enumeration staff also admitted to The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity that because of a lack of a monitoring by assistant commissioners and the non-payment of allowances on time had demoralised the census staff.

They added that this was the reason behind the census staff not counting people on all floors of high-rise buildings.

These complaints were brought to the attention of the Sindh government previously as well, after which the MQM-P, Jamaat-e-Islami, and PTI protested against the census process.

Subsequently, the deadline was extended to May 15 and the assistant and deputy commissioners were pressured to take their job seriously.

“However, after 10 to 15 days, these officers have gone back to their old ways. They are withholding allowances and not monitoring the process,” alleged an official.

(With input from our correspondent in Karachi)