• Prison officials launched awareness drive days before expiry of deadline for postal ballots
• Legal aid worker says registration processes too complicated for average prisoner to navigate

DESPITE ‘eleventh hour’ efforts by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and jail authorities to facilitate inmates across the country’s prisons to cast their votes in the upcoming elections, a sizeable number of prisoners would still be unable to exercise their right to franchise.

This, Dawn has learnt, is mainly due to a delayed awareness campaign and arrangements being made at the last minute, including the fact that a number of inmates do not have valid identity cards.

According to the law, a prison inmate can cast their vote via postal ballot. Those eligible to vote under sections 26 and 96-D of the Elections Act 2017 can send a request to the relevant returning officer (RO) of their constituency before the deadline for finalising mail-in ballots.

The RO will verify the request with the help of the voting list of their area, and if the names of the aspiring votes are in the same constituency, the concerned RO will send two envelopes to the jail administration.

One will contain the address of the RO, with a small and a large envelope inside it. After casting their vote, the inmate has to hand over the envelope to the jail administration, which is bound to return it to the concerned RO through the post, ensuring that the votes are counted.

However, according to an official from Karachi’s Central Prison, the run-up to these elections marks the “first time” that the ECP had formally communicated with jail authorities and asked them to guide inmates about the procedure of casting votes.

An ECP spokesperson told Dawn the commission had written to the officials of Karachi Central Jail to facilitate inmates and make them aware of all formalities so that all of them are able to vote through postal ballots.

However, this exercise was carried out hardly a week before the expiry of the deadline for submission of applications for postal ballots, which was January 22.

In a statement issued on Jan 17, ECP had said it had conducted a pre-poll exercise in the women’s section of Karachi’s largest prison to guide inmates on the process of exercising their right to vote through postal ballots. This too was done only a few days before the deadline.

According to data issued by the ECP, 449,287 people from around the country had applied for postal ballots this time around.

Besides prisoners, the applicants include differently-abled persons, polling and security staff on election duty and other government officials. But only 145 inmates from Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail sent in such applications. DSP Ammad Chandio of Karachi’s Central Jail did not provide exact numbers, but said that ‘hundreds of inmates’ had applied to cast their votes through postal ballots.

Currently, the facility has over 6,800 inmates. Of these, more than 5,880 are under trial and over 950 have been convicted. The estimate of ‘hundreds’ provided by the official shows that even now, a majority of inmates will still be unable to vote.

The most common hurdle to inmates casting their votes is the absence of a valid CNIC, or their ID cards having expired.

Thus, for many of them, voting for their favorite parties and candidates would still be a distant dream.

During a recent visit to the prison, Dawn spoke to a number of inmates – who were among those sitting for exams of the Sindh technical board on the day – who narrated how nobody was serious to ensure that inmates got the right to vote.

These inmates are not only learning different IT skills, but also languages such as English and Chinese. But despite being educated, most would remain deprived of their right to vote.

One prisoner said that Nadra was a major hurdle in this regard, as it asked for “too many documents” to make a fresh CNIC or renew an old one.

When asked to comment on this claim, a Nadra spokesperson said nothing was done unnecessarily and that the authority tried to facilitate inmates for the resolution of their issues. However, the spokesperson said, the authority could not issue CNICs unless the inmates provided the required documents.

Barrister Haya Emaan Zahid, who is CEO of the Legal Aid Society (LAS) and Secretary of the Sindh Committee for the Welfare of Prisoners (CWP), told Dawn that the procedure for filling out postal ballot forms was quite lengthy, and many prisoners, being illiterate, were unable to comply with it.

To address this issue, an administrative task force was needed, she said, adding that ultimately, the entire responsibility lay with the jail administration.

Ms Zahid said that there were several literate prisoners in Sindh who had undergone paralegal courses, and suggested that they could have been utilised to help their fellow inmates navigate the postal ballot procedure.

Another inmate, who has been in jail since 2009, said that he had applied for a postal ballot in 2013, but never received a response. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s report on the 2018 general elections in Pakistan also highlighted the ECP’s failure to inform all entitled voters, including prisoners, about postal voting procedures.

Ms Zahid recalled that after several CNIC-related issues in 2013, a collaboration with Nadra was initiated to resolve such issues. Data provided by CWP indicated that a campaign was conducted in two prisons of Karachi and Hyderabad between Nov 2019 to Jan 2020. In this drive, out of 951 applications, over 100 were resolved.

However, in her words, it was unlikely that there had been any awareness campaign for prisoners’ verification in the last six months.

Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2024

To find your constituency and location of your polling booth, SMS your NIC number (no spaces) to 8300. Once you know your constituency, visit the ECP website here for candidates.