LAHORE, Oct 8: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has decided to add 27 million voters to the draft electoral rolls prepared for the next parliamentary elections, making the total number of electors to over 79 million.

The printing of the electoral rolls has started and the task is likely to be completed by the end of Oct. The updated lists would be made public in another one week or so, ECP secretary Kanwar Mohammad Dilshad told Dawn on Monday.

According to Mr Dilshad, the exact number of voters would be made public sometimes next week. In the meantime, the ECP has sent the new information to the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) to update the voter lists, besides adding the supplementary lists of voters to its database.

The ECP is also developing its database with the help of Nadra, but the task is likely to begin after the elections because the ECP is preparing for the new elections and is run short of time for an additional job.

The rolls have been updated by comparing the rolls prepared in 2002 and the draft rolls prepared for the next parliamentary elections.

Mr Dilshad said the ECP had added new voters to the draft rolls after ensuring that all duplicate votes had been deleted and other anomalies removed.

The ECP has been working on updating the electoral rolls under a direction of the Supreme Court on a number of petitions, including the one by Pakistan People’s Party Chairperson Benazir Bhutto, pleading that the draft electoral rolls for 2007 parliamentary elections were faulty as they had missed around 20 million voters as compared to the electoral rolls prepared for the 2002 polls.

Preliminary voters lists, which were put on display on June 13 at the ECP’s designated centres, mostly government schools and colleges, registered 52.1 million voters as compared to the 2002 rolls which enrolled 71.86 voters whose age was lowered from 21 to 18 years. The number of voters from Punjab was 41.23 million.

The last day for the display of draft rolls 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 in the electoral rolls.

The total number of voters on the 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 for the general elections held about five years ago, showed the number of eligible voters at 71.9 million. Those rolls registered around 41.23 million voters from Punjab. —Mahmood Zaman