ISLAMABAD: There is a need for a national emergency voters’ registration drive, if necessary through legislation, to make national identity cards for all the over 1.2 million women missing from the voters’ lists to take part in the 2018 elections.
This was stated by Pakistan People’s Party Senator Farhatullah Babar at a seminar organised by the National Commission on the Status of Women at a local hotel in Islamabad to brainstorm how to enable the women missing from the voters’ lists cast their vote in the general elections due next year.
The national drive should include setting up emergency registration centres, mobile registration vans, incentives by waving registration fee, training staff, opening special women registration centres and providing needed funds to NADRA while at the same time holding it accountable, he said.
In addition, he said, a thought should also be given to whether instead of mandatory CNIC, multiple identity documents may be allowed and whether a way can be found to register women voters enlisted in the 2017 census even without possessing the CNIC.
The backlog is piling up daily as in addition to the 12 million, another 3,500 women entered into missing list every day as they attained the voters’ age, he said.
If elections are to be held on time next year, the women missing from voters lists would have to be provided CNICs in less than 150 days to enable them to vote, he said.
The existing capacity of NADRA and its outreach to the public, however, permits it to issue CNICs to only 7,000 persons per day. Even if NADRA focused largely on women, it may still not be able to provide more than 5,000 CNICs daily to them. It will take more than 15 years for the missing women to find their names in the voters’ lists he said, adding by that time many more would have also become eligible.
Disenfranchising women means disempowering them, he said. “Out of the box solutions will thus have to be found to address the issue,” he added.
He said merely criticising NADRA will not provide any solution. “We also have to empower it to undertake this gigantic task [by] giving it resources and holding it accountable as well,” he said.
He said that in the first instance, the focus should be on launching a special drive in those districts where the gender voting gap is the largest.
By doing so NADRA will not spread it too thin and gains will be the highest, he said, and proposed that legislation may be made if necessary for launching the national emergency voters drive.
