House listing from today till Jan 14 and voter verification for 18 days after that. SOURCES: ELECTION COMMISSION OF PAKISTAN
KARACHI:
Bureaucratic anger, mass confusion and hurried meetings heralded in what many people thought was supposed to be the first day of Karachi’s voter verification – it was actually the start of the house count.
This is what will happen: The Election Commission staff will visit each house and allot it a number. They will fill a form with the name and identity card number of the elder of the house and the total count of residents above the age of 18 years. “The final voter lists will be released on March 8,” said Sindh Election Commissioner Mehboob Anwar. The army, Frontier Constabulary and Rangers were just for security.
The Supreme Court had ordered the lists to be rechecked amid accusations that three million voters were fake. This is the first time ever that the army has been asked to help.
The actual door-to-door verification will only start on February 1, eighteen days after a house count wraps up from January 11 to January 14. Thus, contrary to what people expected, January 10 was not the first day. It appears though that even the enumerators (teachers, local government staff), did not have clear orders. “I reached the office of the assistant registration officer in Azam Town, District South but our superiors asked to come on Friday because there was no proper arrangement and security officials were missing,” a primary teacher said.
On Thursday it appeared that teams were active in only District Central. Some enumerators went out to mark houses with chalk, but without the army. Here is where one problem lies. Critics, both in political parties and the bureaucracy, say that it is not enough for the law enforcers to just provide security. It matters who is verifying the voter lists as well and if the same fake voters are allowed to slip through again.
A convoy of the Pakistan Army passing by Club Road to ensure security during an ECP drive to verify the millions of voters in the metropolis on Thursday. PHOTO: MOHAMMAD AZEEM/EXPRESS
“Senior school teachers have been appointed as supervisors, grade 17 officials, including headmasters, are Assistant Registration Officers and District Election Commissioners are the registration officers,” explained District Election Commissioner, South Wasim Ahmed Jafferi. Each enumerator gets a block, they verify the rolls, submit the filled forms to the ARO who sends it to the registration officers and then it goes to the provincial election commissioner.
The problem is that the ECP doesn’t have enough staff and will have to rely on the district and city government to provide the manpower. Around 11,300 staffers are expected to verify 6.9 million registered voters in 13,622 census blocks. ARO Hakeem Khan, working from Shireen Jinnah Colony to Abdullah Shah Ghazi, said that they were short of hands and were told really late in the day that they had to do this work.
It is not clear how all this work will get done in this timeframe or how house listing will be wrapped up in four days for a city like Karachi. Hiba Wajahat of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Block 14 told The Express Tribune that teams arrived in the afternoon to the neighbourhood which is infested with high-rise residential apartments. It would appear that it could take days for anyone to count each household unit here.
But even if the work started in some areas, there were other technical problems. An ARO who was tasked with Keamari, Sultanabad, Lalazar and Ghass Bandar told The Express Tribune that he had a hard time because the maps provided by the ECP were old, making it hard for him to find the houses.
The entire exercise is being watched carefully by some neighbourhoods and especially the political parties there. The verification will be important for voters who have been listed at their non-Karachi hometowns. As Tariq Nawab, a resident of Machar Colony, explained, when no teams visited their area, their elders and party workers of the Awami National Party and the Pakistan Peoples Party met. “We have asked residents to keep their CNICs at homes to fix their voter registration problems,” he said. “Most of their votes have been shifted to their villages.”
With reporting by Amir Khan, Sameer Mandhro, Rizwan Shehzad, Sohail Khattak, Noman Ahmed
Published in The Express Tribune, January 11th, 2013.