Reforms to make elections more credible

ISLAMABAD: The inclusive draft electoral reforms unanimously prepared by a cross-party parliamentary committee contain commendable clauses that will make the forthcoming general elections more credible, transparent, impartial and controversy-free.

The committee debated each and every proposal made by its members or coming from other circles so that a universal consensus is achieved.

There will be hardly any roadblocks in the passage of the reforms in the parliament as all the parties and groups prepared this package. Whatever little reservations that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has aired will hopefully be taken care of during the parliamentary debate on the package.

Its main ‘concern’, articulated by one of its members out of the committee, is about the absolute independence and powers of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). The ruling party has no objection to such freedom of the electoral forum.

Special attention has been paid to maximum involvement of women in the parliamentary system. It is being made mandatory that the result of any federal or provincial constituency can be annulled by the ECP where there is less than 10pc turnout of female voters. In case of less voting, it would be understood that some illegal method was used to keep woman voters away from the process. Another clause enhances also tremendous participation of women. It binds the political parties to sponsor at least 6pc females while awarding tickets.

It is already obligatory under the Constitution to elect sixty women to the National Assembly on special seats on proportional representation basis by 272 directly elected MPs. This brings the female quota to 22pc. Balochistan has a representation of three women, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) eight females, Punjab 35 women, Sindh 14 females and federal capital two women. A similar percentage is in vogue in provincial assemblies and even in local governments.

It is believed that the electoral reforms will take into account this allocation for womenwhile considering the mandatory tickets that the political parties will award to the females. However, if both the provisions are followed, the females’ share will come to about 27pc of the total membership of assemblies.

Woman voters in Punjab and Sindh do not face social or other problems in exercising their right of franchise. However, the females in some parts of KP and Balochistan are not immune from such difficulties because of peculiar local conditions that are implemented though illegally by male chauvinists on different grounds.

Another good clause of the reforms package specifies instant recount where the difference of victory margin is 10,000 votes. This will undo the subsequent litigation for the same purpose. The recounting will obviously be done on the request of the losing aspirant.

The ECP has successively been battered by the political parties after they had been facing defeat because of rejection by the voters due to their own performance. But they always thrashed the electoral commission unjustly, cruelly subjecting to wild allegations.

The proposed reforms tremendously strengthen the ECP by giving it total administrative and financial independence as enjoyed by the Supreme Court. It is being empowered to punish those guilty of misconduct.

There has been proliferation of political parties registered by the ECP. To curb paper parties’ bid to get ECP’s registration and to lessen the burden on the electoral commission, it has been suggested that political entities having an extremely negligible number of workers will not be listed.

Of hundreds of registered political parties, only a handful of them actually take part in elections by fielding nominees. Even some parties, which pose themselves as huge political forces, fail to put up candidates in a predominant majority of federal and provincial constituencies.

The bipartisan parliamentary committee took a long time to come out with the present package. It had been deliberating upon the reforms for some three years. However, the ruling party always tried to conclude these discussions and formulate the recommendations when the next elections to be held in 2018 would be close. It had this timeframe in its mind that it implemented.

It is unlikely that the package will take any long time to get approval from the parliament after it would be tabled in the next few weeks because of the consensus among the parliamentary stakeholders.