LAHORE, Jan 1: Preparations for general elections kicked off in the province on Tuesday with the Election Commission launching a door to door verification campaign for electoral rolls prepared recently by the National Database and Registration Authority.

The verification is the first step in a 12-stage process to prepare, what EC calls, “error-free electoral rolls for fair and free elections.”

More than 48,000 people have assigned the task to be completed in a month’s time. The EC staff will verify the electoral rolls prepared by the Nadra for recent local government elections and can suggest changes.

After the verification and suggested modifications, the lists will be sent back to the Nadra. Once the Nadra effects the changes, the lists will be returned to the EC, which will recheck them and publish them for public objections. Judicial officers will supervise this phase. The EC will send the final lists to the Nadra for publication by Aug 14.

The process will be monitored by 44 registration officers in the Punjab who will be assisted by 990 assistant registration officers, 11,958 supervisor and 35,478 enumerators. The ROs have been selected from the Election Commission staff and AROs from the provincial Education Department; headmasters of schools from urban and assistant educations officers from rural areas. The supervisors and enumerators have been hired from among schoolteachers. The training process and the instruction manual have been finalized.

Since the elections are planned with separate electorates, there will be four separate lists for non-Muslim voters; one for Christians, one for Hindus and Scheduled Castes, one for Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and other non-Muslims and one for Qadianis.

According to the instruction manual issued by the EC, the forms for changes in the lists can be filled in Urdu only since use of another language might cause confusion about the name. The only exception is Sindh where names can also written in the vernacular script.

Biharis from Bangladesh, who migrated to Pakistan with intention of living here would be considered Pakistanis and included in the list, the manual says. So would be Kashmiris till a final decision about the state. The Afghan refugees will not form part of the lists and the supervisors and enumerators have been told to deal with the matter strictly.

About the qualifications of voters, the manual says that all those acquiring the age of 21 years or more on Jan 1, 2002, will be included in the electoral lists. The voter must hold a national identity card and should not have been declared insane by any court of the country.

About the delimitation process, an Election Commission official said the work could be started after the electoral lists were complete and the government took a decision about the total number of National Assembly seats. As far as the Election Commission was concerned, the ground work had been completed. The district maps, he said, were ready and the exercise would take only two to three months.