The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provincial government led by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has agreed to hold local government (LG) elections without a biometric voting system, giving up its long-standing demand that LG elections should be held through electronic thumb verification machines, with a view to ensuring transparency and ending allegations of rigging afterwards.
A letter was written to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) stating that the KP government was ready to conduct LG elections in April 2015 without the biometric system. The office of senior provincial minister Inayatullah Khan confirmed this development.
Khan, who holds the portfolio of the Local Government and Rural Development Department, said that the provincial government had been demanding use of the biometric system since day one, but the ECP was not ready to use it at such short notice.
Inayatullah added that the ECP said arrangements would be made for the elections by May 2015.
On November 14, an ECP official had surprised members of the parliamentary committee on electoral reforms when he told them that electronic voting machines (EVMs) were just as prone to fraud -if not more -as traditional polling methods.
ECP Director General Information Technology Khizar Aziz had candidly told the parliamentary body that the software used by EVMs could be manipulated to affect the results. He said that EVMs installed at polling station were vulnerable to hacking via bluetooth signals and other forms of wireless connectivity.
The ECP official also said that it was a myth that EVMs could make the electoral exercise 100 percent fair and transparent. He had cited examples of six European countries, which had switched back to conventional voting methods after abandoning EVMs because of a lack of transparency and trust. The Supreme Court of Germany had also declared EVMs unconstitutional, the official had said.