LAHORE, Sept 17: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) is likely to complete the final draft of electoral rolls by the first week of the next month after the field staff communicated to the commission reports on the registration of new voters last week.

According to a senior ECP official, the provincial establishments of the commission completed their job of adding new voters to draft rolls by tallying the rolls prepared for the October 2002 polls and lists prepared for the next elections.

The commission, according to the official, has met the deadline set by the Supreme Court to this effect.

The Punjab Election Commission (PEC) employed the field staff, mostly government school teachers who were earlier engaged for a door-to-door enumeration of voters, in all districts where the local election offices verified the addition of new voters after obtaining the evidence of the voters’ age and other particulars and also removed a variety of anomalies in the new rolls.

The commission also distributed some 1.5 million forms (Form IV) to the staff in their respective districts to include more voters. These forms have since been collected from across the earlier centres where draft rolls were put on display for inviting public objections and seeking fresh applications for registration of voters. The field staff is said to have included only those voters whose inclusion has been approved by the district election officers.

The provincial establishment expects that another one million voters may be included in the rolls in the light of these forms.

Preliminary lists were put on display on June 13 “for public information and inviting claims, objections and corrections” at the ECP’s designated centres, mostly government schools sand colleges. The last day for the display expired on July 3 and the ECP allowed another 15-day extension which ended on July 18. During this period the Punjab office registered another about 650,000 voters.

The total number of voters on draft rolls then increased to around 37 million in Punjab. This number across the country was 52.2 million. The final electoral rolls prepared on Oct 1, 2002 showed the number of eligible voters at 71.9 million. Those rolls registered around 41.23 million voters from Punjab.

A PEC senior official told Dawn that the process of registration of new voters would continue till the election schedule was announced. According to him, Section 18 of the Electoral Rolls Act, 1974, empowered the ECP’s registration officers to receive applications for an addition to the electoral rolls even on a plain paper.

The official said the new rolls would be completed by the first week of October this year. But the registration of new voters would continue upon the submission of the application along with any identity to prove the voters age till the election schedule was announced.