LAHORE, Feb 15: The number of new polling stations set up vis-a-vis the new registered voters for the Feb 18 election is far less than the ratio between the voters and the polling stations in the 2002 election, reveals a study of statistics made available by the Punjab Election Commission.

In Punjab alone, for two constituencies of National Assembly (NA-48 and NA-49), the election commission has registered 3.31 million new voters and set up 137 new polling stations without keeping track of the existing ratio between the registered voters and the polling stations.

The figures reveal that the commission has established one polling station for 24,211 voters. In the 2002 election, the commission had set up 37,884 polling stations against a total of over 41.65 million voters; one polling station existed for every 1,100 voters.

With the addition of 3.31 million new voters for the upcoming polls, the total number of registered voters in Punjab has gone up to 44.99 million. With lesser number of polling stations, the number of voters per polling station has gone up to 1,182 voters per polling station.

Political parties believe that the lesser number of polling stations mean lower turnout and greater room for the government to manipulate the election.

Talking to Dawn, ex-PPP Senator Sardar Latif Khosa said the party believed that the voters would be deprived of their right to franchise because of paucity of polling stations.

“Voters will queue up outside polling stations in great numbers, but will not be able to cast their votes because of overcrowding. They would have to go back without casting their votes after the lapse of official time,” he said.

He said the party had looked into every aspect of the polling and believed that a few voters would turn up before noon to cast their votes because of cold weather. He added that when people would finally gather, they would be deprived of their right to franchise because of a small number of polling stations.

ECP secretary Kanwar Muhammad Dilshad disagrees with the contention and says according to their experience, a polling station could serve 1,200 to 2,200 voters easily. He said the impact of the increase in the number of new voters would not matter because these were spread over almost all districts of the province, where even the existing polling stations were sufficient.

Though the number of polling stations in Islamabad, Punjab, Balochistan and the NWFP shows a small increase, their number was reduced by 551 in Sindh and 12 in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This exercise has brought the total number of polling stations down to 64,176 from 64,470 in 2002.

In Sindh, where the number of registered voters has increased by 3.41 million, the number of polling stations has been reduced by 551. For the 2002 polls, as many as 13,957 polling stations with 37,132 booths were set up in the province for 16.88 million voters. This time, around 13,406 polling stations with 39,329 polling booths will be set up for 19.50 million registered voters.