ISLAMABAD: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Wednesday decided that over four million Pakistani expatriates will not able to cast their votes in elections due to legal hurdles and the unavailability of an adequate voting mechanism.
It decided against providing voting facilities to overseas Pakistanis for the upcoming general elections.
The ECP was considering giving voting rights to more than 4 million Pakistanis who are in different countries around the world.
It said that the reason for this decision was that making arrangements for providing voting facilities to so many people abroad, spread in 106 countries, would be an impossible task in such a short time as general elections were not far away.
However, the ECP said that these expatriates could come to Pakistan and vote instead.
It said that the issue has not been discarded but postponed as the forthcoming elections have many matters that need to be attended to in a short period of time.
What a damper!!! Ab vote daalney ke leeye Pakistan jaana parrey ga???
Expats are remitting over $1 billion to Pakistan every month and these guys cannot arrange even voting system for us.
That is HIGHLY disappointing, we were doing a lot of work to educate overseas Pakistanis about the importance of votes and a LOT of people were convinced about voting but they will all be left disappointed now. PTI will surely be affected by this decision as MOST i people i approached were more than happy to take part in elections and vote for PTI.
In fact there was huge excitement amongst Pakistanis here but these people are just incompetent and useless :(
I was excited to vote in a Pakistani election the first time in life since I left Pakistan in my teens. I think govt. estimate was going in favor of PTI so these cowards just chickened out
The govt passed the law to let expats vote. So, if you want to blame anyone blame the ECP.
It must be very naive to think that ECP acted on its own, as if it is independent and free. :)
Govt. had no choice but to declare the voting right for expats after the SC ruling but yet againt they played their dirty game and came up with the lamest of the excuses.
which govt. obviously failed to do. If it was honest in intentions, they had more than enough time to do that.
I am sure the ECP must be thinking about putting in place a stereotype system for which they found the remain time was not enough. Pakistan has diplomatic presence in almost every country with huge apparatus, manpower and funding. It is mind-boggling as to why balloting arrangements cannot be done. The ECP should have consulted international tech firms to come up with an out-of-the-box solution for allowing voting from abroad. If Curiosity can send videos from the Mars, why we cannot cast votes from the max distance of a few thousand kilometers?
I am sure the ECP must be thinking about putting in place a stereotype system for which they found the remain time was not enough. Pakistan has diplomatic presence in almost every country with huge apparatus, manpower and funding. It is mind-boggling as to why balloting arrangements cannot be done. The ECP should have consulted international tech firms to come up with an out-of-the-box solution for allowing voting from abroad. If Curiosity can send videos from the Mars, why we cannot cast votes from the max distance of a few thousand kilometers?
A simple soultion could have been web based. I can not imagine any expat not having Internet access abroad.
Register the voters based on NICOP ID's and emails. The constitunecy and candidates can also be defined for each NICOP id holder by their parmenent address in Pakistan. So, when they log in, they have only choices for their own constituency. Make the voting similar to anonymous Poll and make the result readily available for that. You can set the time limit of the poll too... All can be done officially from the local consulate/embassy website, or from ECP website or a dedicated website for such purposes with enough bandwidth. This is the simplest of the solutions. Seriously. There can not be any rigging in this since total number of expats are displayed and each vote is only given by logging through one valid NICOP id.
Ab vote daalney ke leeye Pakistan jaana parrey ga??? 
