ISLAMABAD: Four districts of Punjab province account for around a million ‘unverified voters’, enrolled in the electoral rolls with their permanent addresses. Lahore leads the districts with 0.384m such entries.
According to data, the three other districts are Faisalabad (0.256m), Rawalpindi (0.192m) and Rahimyar Khan (0.156m).
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had recently revealed that 4.8m voters could not be contacted during the door-to-door verification exercise carried out to update the voters’ lists.
Of the ‘unverified entries, 2m were in Punjab, 0.662m in Sindh, 0.583m in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 0.167m in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and 0.163m in Balochistan. The other cities with a high concentration of unverified voters include Sargodha (0.141m), Gujranwala (0.131m), Multan (0.122m), Sialkot (0.112m), Okara (0.110m), Sheikhupura (0.107m) and Kasur (0.101m).
The districts with less than 100,000 (but still a significant number of) unverified voters are Muzaffargarh (96,130), Gujrat (94,639), Vehari (87,361), Sahiwal (86,384), Bahawalpur (81,630), Khanewal (79,256), Bahawalnagar (64,542), Dera Ghazi Khan (63,156), Rajanpur (55,500), Jhang (54,684), Jhelum (51,993) and Narowal (49,994).
The members of the Senate Special Committee on Election Issues headed by Jahangir Badar had expressed serious concerns over what they called bogus entries in the electoral rolls.
The ECP and the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra), however, had defended the ‘unverified voters’ and said that although they could not be contacted during the verification drive they were genuine voters and could not be disenfranchised.
When contacted, a senior official of Nadra said the authority had complete record of all such individuals, including their family tree, addresses and details of the people who attested their applications before issuance of computerised national identity cards to them. These individuals, he said, included members of the parliament, judges, government and semi-government employees and personnel of armed forces. He said such individuals could not be contacted either because of rain and flood or the law and order situation.
Internews
