June 27, 2007	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 11, 1428

LAHORE, June 26: The Punjab establishment of the Election Commission of Pakistan has clarified that new computerised national identity card is mandatory for the registration of voters in the new electoral rolls and no other identity is acceptable under the law.

“The Electoral Rolls Act, 1974, was amended to provide that the CNIC should be mentioned in the new electoral rolls as part of a voter’s identity and this information is a legal requirement not only for the registration of a new vote but also for the purpose of casting vote”, Punjab Election Commissioner Ayaz Mohammad Baig said while talking to this correspondent.

Taking notice of the objections being raised by certain political parties about the process of the registration of new votes, he said that the ECP was under a legal obligation to accept only the CNIC for the purpose.

Asked if a driving licence or a passport could be admitted as an identity, he said that the production of the new ID card was also required for obtaining a licence or passport; it was in the same spirit that votes could neither be registered nor cast without the new identity card.

VOTERS: PPP’s central coordinator of the information bureau MPA Farzana Raja says that the ECP has not registered as many as 15 million voters in the new rolls. Punjab PPP secretary-general Ghulam Abbas says that an overwhelming majority of the voters yet to be registered are voters of his party. They have been left out by the government, particularly in villages, with the help of the ruling party’s union council nazims and council members, he adds.

He says that about 50,000 voters are not registered in his constituency in Sialkot and many other sitting and former legislators of the party have made similar complaints.

PPP’s Lahore women wing media adviser Farah Azam Arain also made a similar claim saying that about 140,000 people were not enrolled as voters in the latest electoral rolls in Lahore. She said that the shortfall existed in the rolls prepared for all the 150 union councils in the city. According to her estimate, 800 to 1,300 eligible voters were missing from each union council.

Mr Baig, however, said the number of voters yet to be registered is 2.9 million across the country. The number of voters registered during the same period is around 35 million.

He said that the National Database Registration Authority had reported to the ECP that it had issued new identity cards to around 55 million people by the end of May 2007. The ECP, he said, had registered around 52.1 million voters over the same period of time.

This meant that the ECP had yet to register about 2.9 million more voters and not as being claimed by political parties.

The ECP’s Punjab chief said that the process of registration of new voters would continue till the election schedule was announced. He said that the new electoral rolls would be completed in September this year. But the new voters would continue to be registered upon submission of forms along with copies of the new national identity cards. “Thus all persons eligible to be registered as voters, still have a chance to become part of the electoral rolls,” he added.

He, however, admitted certain anomalies in the preparation of new electoral rolls starting from house-to-house enumeration to their display at designated centres. He said that teachers who were assigned with the job might not have performed their duty as meticulously as expected of them.

He also conceded to the objection raised by political parties that the display centres were not properly managed in the absence of the staff. He said that he had received such complaints and was taking action against the staff concerned.

However, rejecting the objection that the display centres were difficult to locate, he said several thousand centres were established at public places, mostly schools and colleges, throughout the province where teachers were supposed to remain present from morning to 5pm to entertain objections. The display centres were notified in a gazette which was made public for general awareness, he added.

He said 852 display centres had been set up in various localities of Lahore. Besides, he said, 45 complaint centres had also been established in all the 35 districts of the province, including the ECP provincial office in Lahore, to entertain complaints about the display centres’ staff.

WOMAN VOTERS: Ms Raja also notes a sharp decline in the registration of women as voters, especially in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The Punjab ECP chief says the women have always been victims of social pressure in this regard and fewer of them were included in electoral rolls in the past also.

He particularly mentioned Mianwali, Dera Ghazi Khan, Rajapur, Muzaffargarh and areas adjoining the NWFP where complaints of preventing women from being registered as voters had been received.

However, he did not agree to Ms Raja’s claim.

As for the objection that the ECP had not put the new electoral rolls on its website, Mr Baig said that they would be uploaded when finalised.