- ECP can, if it tries, succeed in improving voting practice
“For the purpose of each national general election to the State Parliament (National Assembly), and to a Provincial Legislature, an Election Commission shall be constituted in accordance with Article 239G. It shall be the duty of the Election Commission constituted in relation to an election to organise and conduct the election and to make such arrangements as are necessary to ensure that the election is conducted honestly, justly, fairly and in accordance with law, and that corrupt practices are guarded against.”
Article 218 – 219: Election Commissions; Part VIII, Chapter:1 Chief Election Commissioner,
Source: The Constitution of Pakistan
By law, all citizens above a certain age have the right to vote.
To conduct an election justly and fairly means much more the conventional requirement to ensure that ballot boxes are sealed, that votes are counted in accordance with the rules and no mishandling takes place.
There is another requirement which is just as important. It is to ensure that everyone has equal access to the voting booth, that all citizens understand the voting process and are allowed – by law – to take time off to get to the venue. If this is not done, elections are only theoretically for everyone, in actual fact many persons are unable to cast a vote. That is how it has been in these elections.
Whether or not Pakistan’s elections 2018 were fair in the conventional sense is being hotly disputed. But that they were not fair as far as that second requirement mentioned above is concerned, is indisputable, because many people were unable to vote.
The turnout of women was one of the success stories this election. Even where female voter turnout has traditionally been very low, women voted in greater numbers than before because the ECP warned it would take action if women were prevented from voting. As reported in the editorial of a national daily, in a piece of legislation pushed by female legislators the ECP was given the power to declare results void in places with a less than 10 percent turnout, and it did cancel the result of a poll in Lower Dir because of such a low female voter turnout. In such places, men ‘allowed’ and even made it easier for women to vote so that their votes would not be rejected.
It shows that the ECP can, if it tries, succeed in improving voting practice. Obviously however, the will to try was missing. And just as equally, it was difficult to focus on what needed to be done with all the confusion, meddling, and disorganization that surrounded the event.
Voters need time off to vote, and the process needs to be facilitated taking into account that voters are often at work – ideally polling should take place on a weekend – and that polling stations are inaccessible for various reasons in many cases.
According to HRAsia, for example, Malaysia’s Election Offences Act 1954 makes it compulsory for employers to give employees time off to vote in the country’s general elections, without pay deduction or penalty.
To vote took more than an hour for me, the process was so slow. These women had been there before me, and were still there by the time I left
In the UK, polling starts at 7am and ends at 10pm at night. This, although employers are not required by law to give workers time off, makes it possible for almost everyone to vote before or after they start work.
To make it possible for as many people as possible to vote the US has a system of absentee votes which allows citizens who are disabled or not in the country to vote by mail, fax or email, depending on the case. In some American States although not in all, even those who are simply unwilling to go to the polling station can vote this way.
Pakistan has not made it easy for its electorate to cast their vote. Many people did not vote because they were overseas at the time and were not allowed to vote.
Even greater numbers of voters were registered in some other village or city, not where they were currently living or working, and they were unable to leave work to get to the polls physically, and their employers would have docked their pay if they took time off anyway. It is possible for such people to cast a postal ballot, yet many of these people, maids, shopkeepers, labourers, who were in Lahore for example from neighbouring small places, did not vote because they were unaware that they could cast their vote this way. Even if they knew, many of them were unaware that the last date for submitting an application using a prescribed application for a postal ballot was July 10, and they missed the deadline.
At the polling station we went to, it was as the foreign election observers said, that conditions were not good. There were insufficient chairs for the elderly, and few fans. A woman next to me shrouded from head to foot in black nylon fabric was sweating from every inch of visible skin. And yet to their great credit, people came.
Elsewhere, several people I spoke to were unable to vote because they were registered elsewhere and did not know they could vote by mail, as mentioned above.
It is not enough to inform voters on television and in newspapers that they must send an SMS with their ID number to so and so number to obtaining voting information. Such information makes no sense to many people, who do not know how to read and write anyway. Such persons made it to a polling station only to find an hour later – which is at least how long it took to unearth their polling details, often longer – that they were at the wrong station, or lining up outside the wrong room. The nylon lady in black I mentioned earlier was one such person. With her was an elderly lady who seemed about ninety. To vote took more than an hour for me, the process was so slow. These women had been there before me, and were still there by the time I left. They would gladly have been allowed ahead in the queue by all the women present, only they were waiting for their ‘parchis’ all this time with the relevant information which would have enabled them to make it to the right room and queue up outside it all over again.
We forget that Pakistan’s population is predominantly uneducated, and many of us ignore that fact. That many of its people live in areas where there is no electricity, that they are so sunk in the struggle to survive means that information must be taken to them, and brought quite determinedly to their attention.
This job belongs to the ECP, the Election Commission of Pakistan. It all boils down to the priorities.
