Verification of voters to start from July 18

ISLAMABAD: A high level meeting was held at Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Tuesday to check the mechanism of Computerized Electoral Rolls (CER) 2011 and review preparations for conducting door-to-door verification of voters to be started from July 18.

The meeting was presided by Chief Election Commissioner, Justice (retd) Hamid Ali Mirza.

An ECP official told APP that the meeting was apprised that the verification process would be conducted with the help of newly devised 145,000 census blocks by Census Organization across the country for making transparent and error free Computerized Electoral Rolls (CER) 2011.

The ECP is conducting the training of verification staff. The trained teams at the census blocks across the country will complete the census in their respective areas till August 16 and submit data to the ECP.

The electoral rolls will be finalized with the help of data of 85.1 million adult population (91 per cent of the total population) provided by National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and the voter lists made in 2007.

The teams will go door-to-door and get a form filled from a family to

update and verify the information. The form will be signed by the head of the family.

The officials pointed out that it is necessary to revise the data of voter lists in case of death of any member of family.

Usually, the family members of the deceased person do not go to NADRA for cancellation of his CNIC which is very essential to update the voter list.

The ECP is trying to strictly implement the law under which CNIC of the dead person is supposed to be returned back to NADRA within one month. The district administration shall also be made responsible to inform the ECP through district offices.

The information of the citizen with the age of 18 years will be collected through this census, enrolling him on temporary basis so that he can make his CNIC.

The final voter list will be displayed for 21 days in September at

different locations across the country so that the citizens can check their names and complain about any error, objection, correction.

A tribunal will be made to address the complaints of the citizens after displaying the final voter list which will issue notices to both the respondent and petitioner.

The ECP with the help of NADRA is making a transparent database and the CNIC number would be used as a unique identifier for the existing voters' list to discourage the trend of fake voting and to avoid double entry.

The form to be get filled by a citizen will have a separate box for the information about the constituency with which he belong. And if a person changes his location he will be supposed to submit an application for deleting his name from that constituency and move toward other.

It is for the first time in the history of Pakistan that such electoral rolls database is going to be made which will eliminate all possibility of double and bogus voter lists.

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2011