Delete

[Flabbergasted]

Pakistan Supreme Court orders voter list correction within 30 days


Millions of names missing mostly in Punjab and Sindh, says Benazir in petition


Hearing a petition by Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto, a two-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary rejected the Commission’s request that it be given 140 days to update the lists.

Parliamentary elections are due between November 15 and January 15 and the time demanded by the Commission could push back the election schedule.

According to the petition, 20 million voters whose names figure in the 2002 voters’ lists are missing from the new ones, and an additional 10 million persons, who have attained the voting age of 18 years in the last five years, and should have been in the list this time are also missing.

At a hearing of the petition last month, the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission to come up with a formula for including the names of these “missing” voters.

Revised rolls

The 2002 rolls had 72 million voters, while the revised rolls show only 52 million registered voters. The Election Commission says it weeded out duplicate registration of names, and registered only those who could produce a national identity card.

The PPP alleges that the discrepancies in the voting lists are mostly in its strongholds in Sindh and Punjab and alleged this was “pre-election rigging” and “institutionalised fraud”. The party has warned that any election on the basis of these lists would neither be free nor fair.

Unconstitutional

At the last hearing, the court said it was unconstitutional to restrict registration of voters to only those who could produce national identity cards and asked the Commission to come up with a method to correct the lists.

Following the directive, the Election Commission decided to do away with the requirement of national identity cards for registration and decided to launch a new door-to-door drive for enrolment.

http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/11/stories/2007081156591600.htm