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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JPR who wrote (12019)	5/18/2002 8:33:57 AM
From: JPR	Respond to of 12475

Musharraff and the Election Fiction School Children get hands-on experience and lessons in fraudulent election exercise--JPR Dawn.com Opinion page Beyond the referendum By Mohammad Waseem The world opinion has pointed to the unconstitutional nature of the presidential election through referendum and to the deliberate multiple voting, allegedly supervised, arranged and promoted by the state machinery. Examples of procedural laxity included virtual non-application of indelible ink; allowing polling beyond the stipulated time; counting of votes in the absence of poll observers, polling agents of opposition or any members of neutral organizations; stamping of ballots by the election staff or, under their supervision, by voters or even school children; taking away unopened ballot boxes at the end of polling; and collecting identity cards from people and using them for bogus voting. A decade-long exercise in formulation of proposals for reforms in the electoral system led by donor agencies, NGOs, media and political parties has gone down the drain. For example, the Election Commission's independence and neutrality was on top of the reform agenda. It has been beaten into smithereens. The campaign's one-sided character marred the reform agenda for introducing a balanced exercise in canvassing. Provisions for penalizing the use of state machinery and the state functionaries for partisan purposes were ignored. There were similar reform proposals about correcting, updating and cross-checking electoral rolls. The idea that a voting exercise can be carried out without electoral lists never occurred to researchers and protagonists of reform. Waiving the provision for checking the credentials of voters through ID card as the sole proof of identity nullified the political consensus developed through the 1990s as a mechanism to get rid of the curse of impersonation.