- Election Commission ran a voter registration campaign for six months in 103 villages to gather female voters
- The deficit in terms of male and female voters increased from 10.97 million in 2013 to 12.17 million in 2017, the CIRP said
ISLAMABAD: According to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), 57.2 million men and 45.7 million women are registered to vote in the July 25 general election.
“That’s a large number of women,” Nighat Siddique, director of the Women’s Affairs Department at the ECP, told Arab News.
“We ran a female CNIC (Citizens’ National Identity Card) and voter registration campaign for six months in 103 villages to ensure we could empower women with the right to vote.”
But all authorities should take responsibility and ownership of the prevailing gender gap, Siddique said.
“Everyone is a stakeholder and must do more to get women to register themselves to vote. I’ve yet to come across any campaigns or speeches in which the media or political parties have asked women to come out of their homes and register themselves to vote,” she added.
“This isn’t the time to blame each other. It’s time to support each other in the work being done to tackle the gender gap. Everyone must play their due role,” Siddique said.
“The biggest challenge is getting women out of their homes. In many districts male voters go and register themselves, but registration doesn’t really feature as a priority for women, so the ECP had to go, get them out of their homes and have them register.”
But according to the Centre for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan (CIRP), 54.5 million men and 42.4 million women are registered voters.
The deficit in terms of male and female voters increased from 10.97 million in 2013 to 12.17 million in 2017, the CIRP said.