LAHORE: With polling just days away, voters complain that they have found their votes transferred to far-off places and villages.

Javed, a resident of Wahdat Colony, Lahore, claims that he found his vote transferred to Karachi when he sent an SMS to the number publicised by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to facilitate the voters in knowing their polling stations.

“Ironically, my vote has been transferred to Karachi East without my consent, while my wife and two other family members will be casting their ballots in Lahore close to the address mentioned on our CNICs and where they have been living for years,” he told Dawn.

There are those living since decades in a locality and have been casting their votes in all previous elections in polling stations nearby grumble that their right to franchise has been denied by transferring their votes to constituencies they never visited once in their lives what to talk of ever residing there and amending their addresses for post and other documents purposes.

The ECP says these complaints are unfounded as the top election watchdog had launched a month-long awareness campaign in the print and electronic media well before giving the election schedule informing the general public to check their names in the voters’ list at the nearby display centres for removal of errors and omission or addition of their names if found missing or vice versa in the record.

Admitting that human errors and/or computer glitch could not be ruled out, the official says in many cases the “missing” voter concerned or his/her relatives are to be blamed for mentioning him/her as a voter at more than one place leading to such a result.

Claiming that the ECP has had a trail of the transferred votes, he quotes the example of a candidate in Lahore who complained of his name going missing from the voters list but admitted later that his elder brother had submitted an application for transferring the vote in the local body polls two years ago when digital record to the effect was shown to him.

Javed admits that it may be so in his case too. His parents and siblings reside in Karachi and they may have got his name written as a voter in the port city when the electoral rolls were updated, he says.

Senior PTI leader Shireen Mazari also grumbles about split family votes. She wonders in a tweet at her official Twitter account “how the ECP assigned her vote to one polling station and her mother’s to another fairly away from hers.

“Not sure how ECP does this but mbrs of same family with same address are on different polling stations a fair distance from one another! So I will be going to one polling station & my mother in the opposite direction to another polling station! convenience and logic missing?!”

ECP spokesperson Huda Gohar says it’s too late to resolve the problem of “missing” votes as electoral roll cannot be legally amended after election schedule is announced. She says the problem is being faced by those people who ignored the advertisements in the media urging the public to get rectified any error in the voters list by contacting the district election commissioner office concerned.

“The people who did not check their vote details and did not take interest then are the ones now left out with wrong addresses or with temporary addresses.”

Responding to a query, the spokesperson says for 2013 electoral rolls, votes could be registered on temporary, permanent or any other address provided by a voter as at that time the vote was registered automatically through the CNIC in the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) software.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2018