Daily Times

It ought to be safely said that with the arrival of made-in-Pakistan electronic voting machines the future of voting has arrived in Pakistan. Full marks to Shibli Faraz and his team at the ministry of science and technology, as duly appreciated and acknowledged by Prime Minister Imran Khan himself, for making this possible in such a short amount of time. Now, in addition to making the whole process right from casting the vote to having it counted and indeed to calculating the final tally much easier, it will also serve as a litmus test to determine which parties are for transparency in the electoral process and which are not. For you would argue with something like this only if you have something to hide or some axe of your own to grind which only the old system made possible.

It’s not very surprising that some of the most senior members of some opposition parties are also coming out in favour of this innovation, and calling for their own parties to support it as well. Why, after all, wouldn’t our most senior politicians want a system that can get rid of all sorts of problems that are always encountered in our elections in one go? Once this gadget is brought to the mainstream there would be no question of anybody pointing fingers at anybody else with accusations of fraud and vote-stealing flying all over the place. Opposition parties in the last two general elections have simply refused to accept the official result; and the reaction to local body elections and by elections that happen at any given time is no different. The party that wins celebrates and the parties that lose complain of cheating, rigging, and all that.

It would be a pleasant departure from tradition, therefore, to have results of all elections accepted as they come. And once we choose to go down the electronic route, which is what the whole world is turning to for very obvious reasons, then the long wait for the final result and channels bending over backward to make their announcements first and creating all sorts of confusion would also become things of the past. All you would need in the new setting is just a few minutes to tabulate the findings and make them presentable. The government must now address any concerns that the opposition still harbours about this course of action and take care of all the criticism that is being advanced, mostly out of lack of proper knowledge about this innovation, and then we would be ready to implement it. Surely that’s a win-win situation for all parties concerned. *