The debate over implementation of voting has been going on for a while between SC and ECP. A petition was filed by PTI in SC of Pakistan to grant overseas Pakistanis a right to vote. Lets take a quick look at the demographics of Pakistan and how it plays a role in voting process. The majority of voters in Pakistan belong to rural areas, more than 60% (64% to be precise per data from World Bank Rural population (% of total population) | Data | Table .) Unfortunately due to low or 0% literacy rate, people of rural area criteria to vote is not based on a candidate’s or a party’s capabilities or their ability to deliver but on Zaat Biraadri, Peeri/Faqiree/Gaddi Nasheen or perhaps some monetary gains they get from regional parties in the amount of few hundred or thousand rupees per household or per person. So it is safe to say that, maybe not in all cases but in many cases their votes are either bought out or are influenced by these factors I have just mentioned. Due to extreme poverty and 0% literacy rate, a very significant number of rural people are unable to distinguish between good and bad, can’t evaluate their decisions and relate them with facts. The above mentioned monetary and Zaat Biraadri factors put a great deal of influence on their decisions. Therefore, these factors provide opportunities to these political parties who take full advantage of these weaknesses and exploit it very effectively. So, all these parties have to do is either give those people a free full day meal or pay them cash in return for their votes.
Every single traditional political party in Pakistan doesn’t get tired of bragging about their recently launched manifestos and how it provides all the goods about solving gigantic issues that is faced by Pakistan. My question is, the manifestos are always good anyways. So what is the point bragging about it? Have you ever seen any political party with a manifesto that would have anything bad? This is just another way of making fool out of people and play with their conscience.
The work on voting rights for overseas Pakistanis should’ve begun at least three years ago. I agree with ECP to an extent when they say that there are several legal and technical issues that would need to be addressed and worked upon before this can be implemented and it would be quite impossible to put this in place in such a short time for the upcoming elections. E-Voting is a complex issue and it will have to go thru various testing phases before it can be fully implemented into production. The software/application that has been developed will need to go thru extensive testing to ensure it doesn’t crash while several thousand users/voters are online trying to cast their votes or the servers where it would reside doesn’t crash due to heavy load of network traffic. Then there are security related issues. You need be sure that the information is transmitted from point A to point B in a secure manner without being tampered, meaning that the integrity of the information should be intact when it reaches its destination, i.e. the vote cast in this case. There needs to be strict and effective security controls put in place on both ends, i.e. client side and server side, not to mention other networking devices such as firewalls, routers and switches, to ensure the transmission goes thru without being changed or tampered with and voters are authenticated correctly and their identities are validated. All these are critical steps otherwise it could result in bogus voting. All this requires time which is a luxury the ECP doesn’t have. But who is to be blamed for this? This E-Voting issue was brought into govt.’s attention long time ago and they had sufficient time to have authorities start work on this. However, the PPP govt. was least interested in this and so was PML-N as they wouldn’t gain much from the votes of overseas Pakistanis. Both parties don’t have much support among Pakistanis residing offshore; a very large majority of them are supporting IK’s PTI. This whole issue of making E-Voting a possibility was lingered on for the last few years either deliberately or due to outright incompetency of ECP and maybe SC, yes SC, because they could’ve expedited this plan by getting the ECP and NADRA swing into action at least 2 years in advance and prove their worthy consent as they did with other cases by taking suo moto action. ECP and NADRA dragged this whole thing at a snail’s pace on purpose to bring it to the last moments, and now are very conveniently making lame excuses that it can’t be done in such a short time.
Now see what change E-Voting could bring in the election this year. If somehow due to a miracle, E-Voting does become a reality this year for overseas Pakistanis, it would dramatically change the dynamics and demographics of the voters in Pakistan in terms of their numbers percentage wise as it would then have the addition of overseas Pakistanis making the number of voters of rural areas irrelevant. It could very well turn the tides in favor of urban voters that would most likely benefit Imran Khan’s PTI. Keep in mind the huge majority of expatriate Pakistanis are willing to vote for PTI as well as youth voters of urban areas in Pakistan. Every single Pakistani I have met in Chicago area is supporting PTI and is ready to vote for them given that he/she is provided the means of voting. The govt., the establishment, major political parties (PPP, PML-N/Q/A/F, JUI, and ANP) know this very well. I have not included MQM here, because I personally think they would probably be able to retain their vote bank from urban Sindh and would form an alliance with whichever party wins the election. So, these major political parties would want to do their best to ensure E-Voting is not implemented at least for this election, because majority of urban Pakistanis are sick and tired of them.