Electoral process: NADRA starts dispatching electoral rolls

Karachi, 35 districts of Punjab are still to receive both copies of the electoral rolls.

ISLAMABAD:

The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) on Friday started the process of dispatching two copies of electoral rolls to each provincial election commission office.

Unlike previous polls, the electoral rolls for the upcoming elections, has two copies. One of the copies— which will be held by the presiding officer of a respective polling station — will have pictures of the registered voters for verification.  While the second copy, meant to be for the general public and political parties, will have no pictures.

NADRA, which helped the election authorities prepare electoral rolls on the basis of computerised identity cards, said in a press statement that two separate copies have already been delivered to Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

“The copies for Sindh, excluding Karachi, have already been printed and delivered,” the NADRA Spokesperson said. Meanwhile, the process for sending both the copies across Punjab is still underway. The spokesperson elaborated that both the copies were sent to only five districts out of the province’s 37 districts. The remaining 35 districts have, for now, only received the copies without the pictures.

The spokesperson added that by using its citizens’ database NADRA, under the directives of Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), has included pictures of all the voters on computerised electoral rolls. This, she said, was done in response to the demand of political parties and civil society organisations regarding various discrepancies in electoral rolls due to fake, multiple or duplicate entries in previous voters’ lists.

Earlier, electoral rolls were prepared only through door-to-door enumeration in hard copies and there was absence of any authentic data to back the process up. However, with the new system the data of approximately 81.2 million was compiled and later sent to NADRA for verification.

The spokesperson quoted NADRA Chairman Tariq Malik as saying that female registration had almost doubled over the past four years. Adding, the percentage grew 50% in 2008 to 86% in 2012, raising the total number of registered female voters to 37.59 million.

Citing the salient features of voter lists she also added that total length of list is 21, 900 kilometers. Moreover, she said total number of books with photograph are 280,000 while total number of books with or without photograph are 420,000.

The total number of registered voters was estimated to be 86,189,751, out of which 49.25 million are from Punjab, 18.96 million from Sindh, 3.33 million from Balochistan and 12.2 million from K-P, 1.73 million.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2013.