The Well Kept Secret How Elections are Stolen from the People and How to Fix It

By Sabahat Ghazal. How many people are aware that 54% of the current members of the National Assembly are sitting in their seats even though a majority of the voters did not vote for them on election day. This is the well kept secret of Pakistan Politics that needs to be exposed and fixed. This secret allows the powerful political party chiefs to control elections by adjusting seats amongst each other and dividing the opposition so that the incumbents and people with some name recognition can easily be elected or re-elected. Pakistan’s plurality based election system allows this injustice to happen.

The funniest part of this is that the constitution does not spell out this method of holding the elections therefore it is something embedded in the system by the Election Commission. And since the Election Commission is under the control of the Supreme Court, this injustice against the people can easily be fixed.

In most developed countries if the winning candidate does not obtain 50% +1 vote from the valid votes cast, there is a runoff election held between the top two candidates. A runoff is considered disadvantageous to the leading candidate. In Pakistan the person obtaining the highest number of valid votes on election day is declared the winner even though he or she has obtained only 17% of the votes cast (true fact in NA-40). In the last major election only 125 of the 272 members received a majority of the votes.

Look at the results of the last general election by party:

MQM seems to be an exception in the list from amongst the leading parties. ANP, MMA and the independents have an embarrassing record and these are the parties in the current government. Also in the PML(Q)’s case only 9/42 members received a majority of the vote. Since the ANP, MMA and some independents are with the government, does the current government represent the will of the people in Pakistan’s representative based democracy? Also how many of the PML(Q) seats would have gone the PML(N) way?

Looking at the same results by province, Sindh has the best record:

The following graph shows the elected representatives who are below water (received a minority of the votes):

These results are based on what was reported by the Election Commission on election day. Affiliation of the independents has changed and therefore the party counts probably now look different. Complete results can be viewed by clicking here.

Thus the elections in Pakistan are manipulated by a handful of people and the representatives who are not elected by the people. They can easily control who runs and who wins. There are many proposals to make the political parties more democratic in their structure, none of which will ever see the light of day as we cannot expect any of the party bosses giving up any of their powers, not in Pakistan for sure.

How can this injustice be allowed against the majority. The political parties present other facts such as the number of voters who voted fro them throughout Pakistan, but that is not a valid argument. We have a representative democracy (Majlise Shura) and not a referendum, therefore the members of this Majlis, each one of them should enjoy the support of the majority of voters in their halaqas.

I cannot find anywhere in the constitution that suggests that this is the way elections are supposed to be held (please correct us if we are wrong), therefore the Election Commission has devised these rules. A simple fixing of these rules may not go all the way in making the parties democratic, but it will go a long way in making the elected representatives more responsive to the people who voted them in.

It is necessary that the current system of election be declared unconstitutional as it is against the fundamental rights of the people, who deserve that their representatives are voted by the majority. The Supreme Court is probably the only body who can fix this and do it quickly by amending the rules of election.

Only the National Assembly is discussed here, but you can imagine that this is happening at every election in Pakistan. What an injustice!

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