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A CREDIBLE election must fulfil the following five conditions.
The electoral rolls must reflect the true presence of eligible voters in each constituency; each voter must know the location of his/her polling station; each voter must cast, or not cast, his/her vote without fear or out of greed, and in complete secrecy; each vote must be counted; and results announced in a transparent way.
Though all these are of equal importance, credible electoral rolls are perhaps the most crucial to the whole process. Sadly, electoral rolls have often become controversial in our country. Often the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is blamed for this. But it’s not that simple.
There are many players who try their best to influence the registration process. But also, as governance is failing overall in the country, government officials who are responsible for registering voters too fail to perform their duties in letter and spirit. Most of them would readily, willingly be co-opted.
Moreover, the presence of different chapters of political parties at the local level creates an uneven playing field. Hence, manipulation is made easier.
A close examination would reveal serious anomalies in the current electoral rolls. The Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen), a coalition of more than 40 civil society organisations, assessed the preliminary electoral rolls during the 45-day display period. It used a robust methodology that was based on two pillars: ‘list to people’ and ‘people to list’.
For the ‘list to people’ method, surveyors would randomly select households from the electoral roll displayed in the area. Then they would visit the selected households and verify the presence of each registered person. For the ‘people to list’ exercise, a list of names of those 18 and over of randomly selected households would be prepared, then the names would be looked up in the electoral rolls.
Based on this survey, the addresses of as many as 18 per cent (list to people) and 30 per cent (people to list) could not be verified in Karachi. According to this finding, some 1.7 million or 25 per cent of voters were missing from the rolls, or were fake voters.
The ECP has used technology for voters to check details through cellphones. Later, Fafen used the ‘8300’ number to verify addresses and CNIC details of eligible voters. In this method too, addresses of about 15 per cent or one million people could not be verified.
In order to further gauge the accuracy of the rolls, the names of the people were also checked. The figure of unverified persons went up to 19 per cent (list to people) and was 30 per cent (people to list).
The final electoral rolls reveal yet another disturbing reality of Karachi. One would expect a higher rate of female voter registration in the city, as the metropolis is being ruled by secular political parties and the literacy rate is higher than the national average.
On the contrary, in comparison to some of the most rural, feudal, less literate and ‘anti-women’ districts of Sindh, in Karachi the gender gap in the rolls is much larger.
For instance in Dadu, Jacobabad, Sanghar and Shikarpur, the gap is 14 per cent, 13 per cent, 13.1 per cent and 10.75 per cent respectively. Comparatively in Karachi East, West, South and Central the gap is 20.17 per cent, 34.5 per cent, 23.3 per cent and 20.5 per cent respectively.
This means as many as 846,997 fewer women are registered as voters than their male counterparts in the most advanced city of Pakistan. Moreover, the overall gap in Karachi exceeds Sindh’s, which is 24.54 per cent and 19.54 respectively. This is scandalous.
One may dare to ask the ruling parties of Sindh and the election authorities to explain this phenomenon. Furthermore, researchers and academics should come forward and investigate such trends not only in Karachi but all over Pakistan.
However, Karachi is a peculiar city in many ways. In the 2008 general elections it witnessed 100 per cent-plus turnout in dozens of polling stations. While the gap between winners and runners-up in the rest of Pakistan was 21.5 per cent, in Karachi it was as high as 76 per cent. Most candidates who won elections in Karachi received the highest percentage of votes.
Coming back to Karachi’s electoral rolls, no doubt missing and fake voters exist all over the country. But the problem is far less in other parts of Pakistan. Many parties challenged the preliminary rolls of Karachi. Consequently, the Supreme Court ordered the ECP to conduct door-to-door verification.
One hopes that the discrepancies are minimised if not eliminated completely. This would indeed enhance the ECP’s credibility. In the meantime, one hopes the ECP and political parties continue working together to improve the other four prerequisites.
Also, the new code of conduct needs some improvement; the real challenge is how to implement it in letter and spirit. In my view, the ECP should seriously think about appointing its own election monitors for the polling.
The code of conduct has been violated in the recently held by-elections and no action was taken against the culprits. In the 2008 general elections too, Karachi witnessed the worst kind of violations of the code.
Had action been taken then against the violators, we would not have been conducting a door-to-door verification exercise in the city today.
The writer works with Pattan and is a social activist.
