KARACHI (July 19 2007): ‘Transparency International’ (TI), Pakistan, has expressed concern over USAID’s showing over 50 million voters under the new computerised electoral rolls. The Computerised Electoral Rolls System (‘Cers’) is one of $18.9 million project, funded by multiple donors including USAID, and administered by UNDP.
TI, Pakistan Chairman Syed Adil Gilani, in a letter sent on July 16 to United States Ambassador Anne W Patterson, termed the details of the project on USAID website as “disturbing”, and described the figure of over 50 million voters as “misleading”.
TI said that the statistics of voters’ list in 2002, made by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) based on population of Pakistan being 132 million, showed 72 million voters. Out of this, 18-21 years age voters were 5.5 million. Now, after five years with 160 million population, new voters to be added to the 72 million old voters may be 8.5 million. “This dichotomy needs to be addressed immediately, and the only solution is that every citizen should have access to the voters’ list so that they may check their names and enlist their names if these are missing.”
The ‘Cers’ is a project of Election Commission of Pakistan, a key step in Pakistan’s democratic development. The initial basic principle of fair and free elections is a credible electoral list, and USAID has rightly chosen the task of supporting electoral process in Pakistan by taking part in its funding so that the whole election process should be fair, transparent and complaint-free, the letter said.
However, the Election Commission of Pakistan, which is supposed to comply with the covenants of the grant agreement of the USAID is not observing the transparency aspect of displaying the electoral rolls on its website for free access of the citizens of Pakistan.
The letter further points out that the issue being faced by Pakistan is that the voters list prepared by the consultants appointed by Election Commission of Pakistan under the USAID funds have come up with only 52 million voters, whereas in 2002 the number of voters was 40 percent more, ie 72 million. This list was prepared by Nadra which has the computerised data of the entire population.
In a separate letter addressed to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), TI has highlighted that monitoring is one of the principles of National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS), an initiative of National Accountability Bureau (NAB). NACS recommends regular and systematic monitoring of the nature, causes and extent of corruption through reliable and verified data collection, analysis and co-ordination.
“TI Pakistan requests the CEC to put the computerised electoral list on ECP website. As the voters’ list has become controversial due to drastic reduced numbers of voters, from 72 million in 2002 ECP list to about 52 million in 2007, it has become imperative that transparency should prevail,” the letter said.
The TI letter has quoted extensively from the speech made by former US Ambassador Nancy Powell in August 2003 at the conference organised by TI, Pakistan on combating corruption in the public and private sectors in Islamabad.
Source: Business Recorder
Date:7/19/2007
