Photo Courtesy: Online/AFP

The latest voters list released by the ECP on March 26 shows that there is only a slight improvement in the percentage of women voters.

The last voters’ statistics were released by the ECP on October 12, 2017, which showed that out of a total voters’ count of 97,022,591, women voters were 42,424,418, which amounted to 43.73 %.

The latest statistics indicate the number of women voters at 45,804,353 out of a total voters’ count of 104,267,581. The new percentage of women voters is, therefore, 43.93 % or just 0.2 percentage point higher than the similar figure some five months ago in October 2017.

The new statistics also indicate that the number of voters has increased by about 7.2 million or around 7.5 % in the past 5 months. The women voters increased by around 8% compared to the men’s votes which increased by about 7%.

The percentage of women voters is still considerably lower than the targeted percentage of 48.77% – the percentage of women in the total population according to the preliminary figures of Population Census 2017. According to this desired percentage, women voters’ number should have been 50,851,299 indicating that more than 5 million eligible women are not yet registered as voters mainly because they have not yet acquired their Computerized National Identification Cards (CNIC). Some other estimates indicate a much higher gender gap of 10 to 12 million in the number voters.

The slight improvement in women voters’ percentage indicates on the one hand that the efforts of the ECP, NADRA, the civil society and others for improved women voter registration through aggressive CNIC issuing efforts that are making some headway. On the other hand, it also shows that the pace of issuing CNICs to women is still not sufficiently fast to bridge the voters’ gender gap before 2018 General Election.