The Pakistani General Elections preparations have been in full swing for the past couple of months. Everywhere one looks, the people are doing their part with regards to it. The government employees running around getting things done, to politicians running their campaigns, to the youth going out and engaging in dialogue with the said politicians to get a better understanding of the manifestos.
With the preparations going on for the elections, one can also see technology being utilized in order to make everything seem more orderly and fast paced.
Efforts by NADRA & ECP
The database authority of the country (NADRA) is also all set to sign an agreement with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to design and develop a system for election candidates to access soft copies of the final electoral rolls with photographs of voters in their respective constituencies.
This decision has been made with regards to Section 79 of the Elections Act 2017 – supply of final electoral rolls that binds the ECP to provide voter details to contesting candidates if such a request is made.
According to the Express Tribune, the draft agreement between the two entities states that NADRA wanted to charge a service fee of approximately Rs10 per voter record. However, a senior ECP official has negotiated the financial aspect of the project with NADRA and has agreed to lower the cost to Rs1 per voter record. Therefore, now it is up to ECP on how much they would charge from the contesting candidate who will request for the provision of final electoral rolls of a constituency in soft format.
However, it is to be noted that a confidentiality clause in the proposed agreement clearly states that the ECP and NADRA will not share, distribute, sell or disclose any confidential information about voters to anyone.
Although on June 13th, the NADRA former deputy chairman leveled serious allegations against the authority with regard to leakage of voters’ data in a bid to change outcomes of upcoming general elections to the detriment or benefit of a particular political party.
As a result, on June 19, the ECP in a letter to NADRA cited ‘some news reports’ that mentioned information on age and gender in electoral rolls and expressed its suspicion that NADRA had leaked the voters’ data.NADRA officials the following day held a press conference where they categorically rejected sharing any data in any shape with any political party or any irrelevant individual.
For the upcoming elections, ECP has decided to use an Android-based mobile app called Results Transmission System (RTS) to compile the final results of general elections 2018-19. According to the commission, they have successfully tested the app through a trial conducted in NA-4, Peshawar and PS-114, Karachi last year where presiding officers (PO) entered the polling results into the application and then sent them in real time to the ECP server. The photo of FORM IVX is also sent along with the results.
ECP Solutions for Overseas Pakistanis
For Pakistanis residing overseas, ECP on Thursday announced the initiation of the “I-Voting Solution” that has been proposed by National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).
The task force for the initiative was also announced, where there job is to technically assess the web-based automated system of the Internet Voting for eligible Pakistani voters living abroad having the National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis (NICOP) and a valid machine-readable Pakistani passport.
Social Media and the Elections 2018
Social media plays a great role these days when it comes to everything, and there is no doubt that it has the power to make or break an entire organization or a person. Therefore to protect the elections from abuse, the social media giant Facebook is working with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to prevent abuse.
According to The News, Facebook is working hard to fight the spread of false news on its platform through a combination of technology and human review, and through arming the users with ability to recognize what might be false.
Furthermore, the social media giant aims to increase the number of people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 people by the end of the year, as it continues to employ dedicated teams working on all of the world’s upcoming elections, including Pakistan.
One of the efforts made is the third-party fact-checking. Starting from this week, Facebook is to begin a pilot of its Third Party Fact Checking to users in Pakistan, in partnership with AFP.
According to a statement from Facebook about the Third Party Fact Checking
“We use signals, including feedback from people on Facebook and clickbait sensationalist headlines, to predict potentially false stories for fact-checkers like AFP to review. When fact-checkers rate a story as false, we significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed — dropping future views on average by more than 80%”
Furthermore, Facebook also helped the Pakistani voters be diligent in making sure that their votes are register. In collaboration with ECP, they made sure that the people are aware if their vote is registered or not by notifying the users with a pop up that asked the voters to check their vote’s registration at 8300. Upon clicking on the link, the user would then be directed to ECP’s website for more information.
Post Elections
To keep tab of the elections and the voter outcome, a startup called Plotree set up a page dedicated to the general elections. On a Pakistan map they showed the seats for the National Assembly, Provincial Assembly and the voter break down in each province/constituency.
They highlighted the number of registered voters in the entire country and also presented how many voters actually turned up to vote. According to Plotree, the voter turnout for the elections 2018 was 51.8%.
