Errors in electoral lists: ECP cannot shift voters’ names without consent, says SC

Seeks details regarding number of voters who have shifted their votes to another constituency.

ISLAMABAD:

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has no authority to shift voters’ names from one constituency to another without their consent, observed the Supreme Court (SC) on Thursday.

Hearing a case regarding the removal of errors from the new electoral lists, the three-judge apex court bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry also sought details from ECP regarding the number of people who have exercised the option to shift their votes to another constituency and the number of people who have not been contacted to verify their votes.

The bench also accepted Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s (MQM) petition for becoming a party in the case. The party had contradicted the claims of various political parties – including Pakistan Peoples Party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, Tehreek-e-Insaf and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) – regarding the shifting of three million votes from Karachi to other districts.

On Wednesday, senior lawyers representing various political parties informed the court that ECP officials had been hijacked by MQM in Karachi, as more than three million voters were shifted from the city to their permanent addresses, despite the fact that they had been living in the city for 10 to 15 years.



MQM counsel Dr Farogh Naseem responded to these allegations on Thursday, questioning how was it possible that three million out of six million votes had been dislocated. He maintained the parties were turning the hearing adversarial and urged an amicable resolution to the issue.

CJ Chaudhry agreed with Naseem’s suggestion and said the matter would be better resolved in a joint meeting between the parties and ECP. Meanwhile, he said, it was ECP’s job to verify voter lists through a door to door campaign.

During the proceedings, ECP Director General Sher Afgan admitted that while the commission had shifted the names of millions of voters with their consent, 4.2 million voters across the country were still unverified. He added that only 20% of Karachi voters were unverified.

In response to Afgan’s statement that ECP had shifted people’s votes based on their permanent addresses according to its policy, CJ Chaudhry observed that it meant the commission did not contact people for verification. He asked why the commission shifted voters without verification. At this, JI’s counsel Rasheed A Rizvi told the bench that hardly five percent voters in Karachi were approached by ECP.

The commission shall brief the court in this regard on November 28.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 23^rd, 2012.