Newly eligible: Electoral rolls to swell by over 7.8 million voters

Poll body is expected to revise voter lists before the LG polls.

ISLAMABAD: Election authorities have decided to add as many as 7.8 million eligible or would-be voters to the electoral rolls during the revision of voter lists slated for next month. The decision was taken during a meeting at the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) headquarters on Monday.

“Approximately 7.8 million new National Identity Cards (NICs), issued by National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) after the 2013 elections, will be added to the electoral rolls whereas approximately 0.5 million or more deceased and disqualified voters will be weeded out from the lists,” the poll supervisory body stated during the meeting.

According to details, the drive to register fresh voters will be start from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) where local government (LG) polls are likely to be held in May while the process would be followed in other provinces later. According to ECP, 1.2 million potential voters in K-P will be included in the electoral lists.

With the deadline to hold LG elections inching closer, the poll body plans to complete the mammoth task of delimitations in Punjab and Sindh before revising the electoral rolls in the provinces.

As a precondition before the local body polls, fresh voter lists are compiled in accordance with the delimitations for local constituencies. During the revision of these lists, new voters are added and subsequently those who have expired are excluded from the poll body’s record. However, in the absence of a mechanism to update these records, a large number of deceased people are still registered to vote in the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th, 2015.