The Election Commission of Pakistan launched a campaign to verify voters’ registration through SMS in February this year. When I saw the news, I fed my computerised National Identity Card number on my cell phone and sent the text message to 8300 as proposed by the ECP. To my surprise the information I received was that my vote was registered in Sargodha. When I fed my wife’s CNIC number and sent for confirmation I got the same reply! We never lived in Sargodha so it was surprising to see our votes registered there. I downloaded the correction form from the Election Commission of Pakistan website and submitted them at one of the designated centres much before the deadline.
Now I recently got to know that the computerised lists of voters are complete and will be available in print by this month’s end. I repeated the exercise and got the same answer – I was still registered in Sargodha. Would the ECP or Nadra bother to clarify why they haven’t updated their computerised teller machine?
Munawar Naqvi
Islamabad