ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly Standing Committee on Parliamentary Affairs has recommended that local government elections be held across the country on the same date, according to same system and under the same laws.

The committee, chaired by Mian Abdul Mannan, which met here on Friday, voiced the opinion that if biometric verification of votes was to be carried out at polling stations, it should be the same across the board and not limited to a specific area or province.

The panel expressed reservations over the varied method of election in the provinces and stressed that similar processes should be introduced across the country and all polls should be held simultaneously. The committee also recommended that a census be carried out before holding local government elections.

A senior ECP official, however, told Dawn that the ideal situation the NA committee envisioned was not feasible at this point. He said that uniformity of laws and electoral processes had been suggested by the ECP before the provinces had even framed their respective laws and rules. But now, he said, trying to build a consensus among the provinces on a uniform law for all would mean delaying the polls indefinitely.

ECP official says doing so will make local polls five times larger than the general elections

The official also said that it was not technically possible to hold all local government elections in the country simultaneously. The exercise, he said, would involve the printing of 500 to 600 million ballot papers, which would take around seven months with the limited resources available to the commission.

He said the transportation of these ballot papers to the concerned provinces, districts and down to the polling stations was also an uphill task. He said the KP government had recently indicated that it was planning to hold LG polls in three phases.

“If a small province is thinking it needs to stagger the polls, how can this exercise be conducted on a single day in the entire country,” the official remarked. He also pointed out that if done this way, the local government elections would become an exercise five times bigger than the general elections.

On Friday, officials from the ECP informed the committee that the commission had been empowered, through an ordinance, to carry out delimitation and prepare electoral rolls for local government polls in the federal capital. The panel was told that Punjab government had also given these powers to the Commission.

They said the Commission was reviewing the updated local government law of Sindh, which has also authorised the ECP to conduct delimitation for local polls in the province.

The standing committee was also told that the KP government had not yet removed the lacunae in its local government rules as pointed out by the commission. ECP officials said the provincial government was insisting on the introduction of biometric machines for the upcoming polls, which would delay them beyond September 2015.

The committee was told that 348 of the seats in local government set-up in Balochistan out of a total 7,167 were still vacant. An appeal concerning local government matters was also pending in the Supreme Court while the matter pertaining to the holding of LG polls in cantonments was also sub judice.

The committee also okayed a bill to amend the political parties order, which proposes minimum allocation of 10 per cent general seats for women and 33pc quota of women in political parties’ general councils. The private members’ bill, introduced by Dr Nafisa Shah and Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho, is aimed at ensuring meaningful representation for women in the political process.

Published in Dawn, November 8th , 2014