KARACHI, July 31: Like elsewhere in the country, all the 27 district election commissioners in Sindh were on Tuesday provided lists of new electoral rolls to facilitate verification of voters’ entry in the rolls.

There were 18,432,877 registered voters —  10,214,460 male and 8,218,417 female — according to the new rolls, said Najeeb Ahmad, director (headquarters) of the Provincial Election Commission while talking to Dawn.

In Karachi, he added, there were 3,912,194 male and 2,942,038 female voters.

In reply to a question, he said that in two to three days these lists would be available at the offices of assistant election commissioners to enable people to check their registration.

If any voter found an irregularity in their name, address or their entry missing, they should get it enrolled by filling in a form available at the office of AEC and attaching their computerised national identity card copy.

For the first time, the facility of filing the forms for entry in the electoral rolls had been provided to the voters at the AEC level, he said.

Mr Ahmad said the corrected entries in the rolls would be published as supplementary lists by the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) every month and this process would continue till the announcement of the election schedule by the Chief Election Commissioner of Pakistan.

Asked as to why the rolls were provided only at the offices of 27 district election commissioners, who were also registration officers, he explained that Nadra had provided only two copies of the lists based on the CNICs to the election commission.

One of them was kept in safe custody while more copies from the other would be prepared for the AEC offices, he said, adding that the rolls would be available at the AEC level within the next two to three days.

In reply to another question, he said that the total number of voters in the electoral rolls was 84,365,000 in Pakistan.

These rolls would be made available at over 55,000 offices, he added.

Asked why the elections would be held on the delimitation of 2002 basis, Mr Ahmad said the delimitation of constituencies was based on population and as no census had been conducted in the country since 1998, correct data about population was not available and as such the question of delimitation of constituencies did not arise.