ECP list misses 20 million voters names, claims PPP

Pakistan Peoples Party has questioned the accuracy and credibility of the provisional voters list issued in piecemeal form by the Election Commission of Pakistan. The provisional voters list issued by the ECP early this week misses at least 20 million voters.
In the list for the city of Lahore alone, the number of voters has gone down by 1.1million. Another 200,000 voters have failed to find their names in the list in district Nawabshah. An EC official himself admitted that 5m voters in Sindh failed to make it to the voters list as they did not possess the CNIC.
Commenting on the ECP's exercise of opening up display centres to put out desegregated provisional lists only for each district, the Central Information Secretary Pakistan Peoples Party Sherry Rehman in a statement on Saturday criticised the non-transparent and non-consultative nature of the whole process.
"The entire voters registration process is replete with irregularities and there are double entries as well as huge numbers of missing voters at every level. The ECP has been highly ambiguous all through the process and most shockingly, has kept the biggest stakeholders, the mainstream political parties, outside the ambit of the exercise.
There is little point in making pilot projects out of two Display Centres to show to international monitors when the consolidated provisional list even at this stage remains mysteriously unavailable." Ms Rehman pointed out that the ECP also refused to allow access to the monitoring bodies and the members of the opposition to database centres conducting the data entry of the new voters despite repeated requests.
"In the latest development, the ECP has declined to provide the opposition members the electronic copy of the total provisional list, on the vague pretext that the constitution doesn't oblige the ECP to do so.
With just 21 days given by the ECP to review the draft, it is next to impossible for the political parties or civil society organisations to travel to remote areas of Pakistan and conduct research into the discrepancies of the draft in each district." She also questioned the ECP's refusal to hand out a consolidated list at the provisional stage.
"Firstly the ECP has a duty to provide the list free of cost to anybody as the voters registration exercise was funded by the taxpayers and the donor bodies, and not from General Musharraf's personal account.
Secondly, we, in the opposition, want the electronic copy of the preliminary version in one place for the whole of Pakistan, and not the 'final' version since as peoples' representatives and stakeholders in the system, it is our right to check the accuracy of the provisional list. If the ECP has indeed done its job with honesty, why is it turning down our requests for the electronic copy of the consolidated lists?"
Ms Rehman said that the PPP has been repeatedly asking for a consolidated provisional list so it can check for double entries from the 2002 list, as well as for thousands of missing voters, but not only did the ECP ignore the PPP's 36 point paper on electoral reform needed, they also disregarded any suggestions or concerns raised by the PPP at different platforms regarding the flaws in the registration process.
"As a result, you get a faulty voters' list that misses swathes of population. The ECP officials themselves had admitted that there are over 78 million voters and the number was set to rise to 80m by the election year. Why then, does the new list carry only around 50mn voters."
She said that the ECP's earlier announcement and the subsequent withdrawal of the compulsion of the CNIC for the voters' registration has created a lot of confusion.
"Despite the withdrawal of the condition, a significant portion of the population has been left out of the enlistment process for reasons best known to the ECP. According to an IRC survey 40 to 50 percent of the voters, including a large majority of women did not possess the CNIC and were not enrolled in the list. If indeed the ECP had lifted the CNIC condition why was such a whopping majority left out of the registration process," Rehman asked.
"We have repeatedly demanded that rather than the CNIC or NIC, any other government document such as passport, rural credit pass or driver's license should be accepted for registration and voting."
Rehman said that voters' registration is the first step to elections and the regime's non-commitment to the cause of holding free and fair elections is evident from irregularities evident in the voters' registration process.
She also observed that another reason for the decrease in the registered voters is that the registration staff failed to carry out the job assigned to it.
"There have been complaints from all across the country that the personnel deputed did not go door-to-door to register voters. Instead, for many areas, they relied on the information provided by the individual in the area that they were staying with."
Similarly, despite repeated requests by the opposition members, the ECP never provided mobile vans for the rural areas to enable them to participate in the registration process, she added.
Ms Rehman said that the highly dubious manner in which the entire registration procedure was carried out coupled with the ECP's refusal to allay the oppositions concerns renders the entire exercise futile.