Verifying voters’ lists

SMS voter verification service will be another valuable tool in ensuring that voters have information they need.

In the run-up to general elections next year, one of the toughest challenges the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) faced was ensuring the preparation of genuine and reliable voters’ lists. It appears to have taken a giant step towards achieving this task on October 17, which was declared as National Voters Day. About 33,000 thousand people used the SMS voter verification service launched by NADRA to check the particulars of their voter registration, bringing the total number of people who have used the service to over nine million. This is, of course, only a small fraction of the total number of registered voters but one can reasonably expect the number of people using the SMS service to increase exponentially the closer we get to elections. And for their efforts so far, both the ECP and NADRA deserve fulsome praise.

The work done by them is even more impressive when you consider that they were given only a few short months by the Supreme Court to prepare voters’ lists. After the 2008 general elections, it was found that nearly 30 per cent of votes cast could not be verified. This does not mean that a third of all votes were bogus; it was simply that the ECP could not be sure if they were genuine votes. Tackling this problem by launching the SMS verification service should be very successful in reducing voter fraud. Indeed, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry himself took part in the SMS verification on National Voters Day, giving his seal of approval to a project that was launched in response to a Supreme Court ruling.

The 2008 elections were considered among the freest in the country’s history. It is encouraging to see that various stakeholders are not simply resting on those laurels but are trying to ensure that the next elections will be even more transparent. Already, the appointment of the incorruptible Fakhruddin Ebrahim as the chief of the ECP has hinted at elections that will remain untainted. The continued success of the SMS voter verification service will be another valuable tool in ensuring that voters have the information they need to cast their ballots. All that is left now is for the usual suspects, who have nothing to do with the democratic process, to stay as far away from the process as possible.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2012.