September 01, 2006	Friday	Sha'aban 7, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Aug 31: The Election Commission of Pakistan has invited bids from private parties for developing an accurate and credible Computerised Electoral Rolls System for the next general elections.

“It is projected that the exercise would cost Rs1 billion because it is a task of a gigantic proportion in which the commission is expecting a 10 per cent increase in the existing 72 million voters. Besides, it intended to develop a common electoral roll both for the next general elections as well as the future local government elections,” Joint Secretary (Elections) R B Jan Wahidi said here on Thursday.

He was speaking at a media workshop held to apprise the journalists of the reasons behind preparing new electoral rolls when already a similar exercise was done in 2000-01. ECP Secretary Kanwar Mohammad Dilshad opened the one-day workshop during which he traced the history of electoral rolls.

Already, five Pakistan-based firms have responded to the Request for Proposal (RFP) of the commission to develop the electoral rolls. The applicants would be short listed in a day or two. These firms have been asked to develop a protected software, safe from manipulation and able to check multiple entries of the same voter.

Explaining why new electoral rolls were being developed when the National Data Base Registration Authority had already undertaken the exercise in 2000-01 at a cost of Rs567.68 million, he said the old lists were replete with errors and attracted lot of criticism. Even specific addresses of the voters were missing, while in many cases the date of birth was wrongly mentioned.

Therefore, the election commission had to undergo a tedious task of verifying each and every entry through house to house visits by enumerators in a phased manner. That was why the 2000- 01 local government elections were held in four to five phases as the data was again sent to the Nadra for improvements and amendments.

Jan Wahidi, however, conceded that Nadra was not at fault entirely for preparing flawed electoral rolls since it was their first experience. Besides, 2000 was also a very eventful year for the commission. He said the electoral rolls were revised repeatedly since the law was amended to include all persons who had attained the age of 18 years. Besides, a new joint electorate elections list was made, which earlier was based on separate electorate system. The strength of the national as well as provincial assemblies was also increased.

About the commission’s decision to allow old national identity cards, he said this time services of local enumerators had been hired to ensure that no refugee, especially Afghans or other foreigners, could be registered in the electoral rolls. Besides, the entire data would again be sent to Nadra to delete bogus entries by checking family tree.