With less than 10 months to go before a caretaker government is put in place to conduct the next general elections, the country was in urgent need of electoral reforms to ensure the polls were carried out fairly. A small step has now been taken with the passage of the Election Bill 2017 in the National Assembly. There are some undoubted positives in the bill. The Election Commission of Pakistan has been made more independent and autonomous, removing the interference of the government in ECP matters. In another positive, the ECP has also been given the power to annul voting in any constituency where the percentage of women voters falls below 10 percent. The ECP will also have to publish constituency-by-constituency data of women registered to vote and make an effort to ensure it is within at least 10 percentage points of male voter registration. To stem any chaos on election day, a list of polling stations will need to be published 30 days before polling day. Strict limits have been placed on the powers of the caretaker government, especially with regard to transfers and postings, all of which will have to be approved by the ECP.
With all the positives in the law, there are still some glaring problems that have not been tackled. Ideally, the reforms bill would have mandated that the results of this year’s census be made available and used for the delimitation of constituencies. But the bill only says that delimitations will be done in accordance with the officially published census. That leaves room for temptation to just go with the existing census. The major problem of money in politics – particularly the dominance of wealthy individuals in getting party tickets – will be further entrenched by the provision of allowing candidates for National Assembly seats to spend Rs4 million rather than the previous Rs1.5 million. The limit for provincial assembly candidates has been increased from Rs1 million to Rs2 million. No system has been put in place for balloting by mail, something which disproportionately affects labourers who have moved away from their homes for work. The government and opposition parties have had four years to discuss electoral reforms. That they have still come up with a package that does so little to improve both the holding of elections and ensuring the results are a fair representation of the public will is a sad reflection of how little priority is given to holding free elections.