Pakistan’s general elections were held on the 18th of February, 2008 after a series of incidents that literally rocked the foundations of the country. After experiencing a bullish market and a stability that we hadn’t experienced in decades, March 2007 to today, Pakistan has had to face one conundrum after another.
For so many reasons, the entire world was looking our way when the 18th February elections were announced. It was on that day more than ever before, that the element of transparent, accountable, democratic vote would play a pivotal role in deciding the path down which we would tread down. And that’s where the true test of a technology solution integrated with the very fabric that was accountable for the elections, took place.
[Gallery not found]Pakistan has been faced a lot of challenges throughout its short lifespan. For an organization to be given the responsibility to conduct free and fair elections, gathering data from the country’s 7,96,096 square kilometers and 160 million population, really has to get you thinking about how to get started. So what was the scope of the challenge? The Election Commission of Pakistan had been given the responsibility of conducting Pakistan’s February 18, 2008 General Elections.
In order to appreciate the monumental task this was from an HR and Technology perspective, we need to take a moment, step back and look into the way data was managed by the ECP in the past.
A Brief History in Time
In order to truly appreciate the automation of the Election Commission of Pakistan, we have to track back into the past and observe the infrastructure that Election Commission has to deal with in order to have their “fair” elections.
The old electoral system in Pakistan has actually passed through several complicated phases between 1947 and 2008. One can only speculate the damage that a biased electoral process has since it is extremely difficult to point a finger at a specific cause that realizes the downfall of a country’s political stability.
From 1947 to 1958, the concept of direct elections at national level did not even exist. Provincial elections were held sporadically. In fact, the first election after the country’s independence was held for a 197-seat Provincial Assemble of Punjab in 1951. Some 939 candidates participated in the election for 189 seats and the remaining were elected unopposed.
The first elections on the basis of adult franchise were held in 1970. Later on the next General elections were held in 1977. What was interesting was that according to records, the total number of registered voters at that time was 30,899,052. The opposition parties unified to form an Electoral Alliance, the Pakistan National Alliance, to contest elections against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan People’s Party.
To enhance the electoral system, the Election Commission of Pakistan was formed under the Constitution of 1973. The Election Commission was mandated to conduct a fair election and control all the matters regarding the elections but this had its share of challenges. With the old, unstructured system in place, the election process was becoming difficult to manage the increasing number of voters.
That voting list was manual and saved on paper documents. Lots of paper documents! And it was on the basis of the same lists, that the elections took place in 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1997. For conduct of Local Government Elections 2000-2001, the Government initially decided to use NADRA’s data to create a new voting list. But the question that needed to be investigated was where NADRA got all their data from. In 1998, the Central Census Organization was created and they traveled from home to home, conducted surveys.
The form had a column where it was mentioned that this form would be used in the next elections and would also be used for passports and driving licenses and they were requested people to provide the exact information such as photographs, thumb impressions. Central Census Organization later joined NADRA, generating the data required for creating a master voting list which would help the Government in conducting its next elections.
The ECP, who had the power to generate the in light of the Act 219 of the Constitution, argued that the data was incorrect simply because it had not been created under the guidance of the law. But because it wasn’t a Civil Government at the time, the Constitution was suspended. Based on reports, the Census teams did not have access to regions in Balochistan where the Census teams had included people there regardless of whether they had a National Identity Card or not. As a result, the voting list that was created based on the collected data, sat at about 720,000 “registered” voters at the time. They called this a computerized list but it was just transcribed lists which were extremely passive and isolated. It was on this list that the 2002 elections were conducted upon.
The Election Commission appointed District Returning Officer for each District and a Returning Officer for each community. As a rule, the Returning Officers had to be Additional District and Sessions Judges. This rule is still implemented but the situations and their duties have changed. These officers have all kind of authorities including the power to validate or reject the voter and polling station list. These Returning Officers also created the list of Assistant Presiding Officers and polling staff, which are then sent to District Returning Officers for approval. The Presiding Officer has the duty to conduct surveys at the Polling Stations and ensure that law and order are sustained.
When the final date of elections is announced, the interested candidates send their nominations to the ECP. The analysis, rejection and the approval of the nomination papers is also a responsibility of the Returning Officers. The Election Commission of Pakistan provides each Returning Officer with a copy of the voter list who then distributes it to the Presiding Officers.
The registration of voters was the most complicated part of the entire elections. The registration of voters was based on a manual system, which worked on a paper and pen system. The government workers went to the town committee offices of all the cities and villages to enlist the names of voters, and this data was saved in ordinary paper sheets. This whole process took weeks for completion and even after such mammoth effort, this data was not obviously neither secure nor verifiable.
There was no way of cross-checking whether a voter had already been registered or even belonged to the district he was being interviewed at. No way to check for duplication of data or account for the identity. There were simply too many possibilities for error and the tampering of the data even after it was filed. In urban areas because of higher literacy, there were significantly fewer challenges however the obstacles remained. Most of the people were listed for more than twice or thrice, which resulted in a foul result. All these problems and complications ultimately resulted in loss of credibility of Electoral Rolls.
“We had a vision that the current list must be a computerized list with minimal corrupted data. We floated a national tender based on international standards, blueprints and documentation.” Muhammad Dilshad. KalSoft was the company that was selected to work with the ECP in automating the Electoral Vote Bank.
Enter E-Government
E-Government is a growing concept around the globe that changes the way government organizations exchange information and services between themselves and with their citizens. G2C or Government-to-Citizen is the concept where online, non-commercial interaction between local and central Government and private individuals takes place. To help meet this change, governments are working to improve their networking infrastructures while also enhancing the security and performance of these systems and Pakistan’s Government is no exception. The solution has already marked a new era in ECP’s history with technological integration into the internal ECP engine and automating manual processes to increase the veracity of the information quality that is to drive the election process.
The e-government initiative enabled both authorities and citizens to faster and better informed, communication and interaction. Both the Government as well as the citizens have been demanding more effective deployment of e-enabled processes to make the democratic process more transparent and accountable. The planning and implementation of the Computerization of the Electoral Rolls is a project that didn’t just facilitate a fair and free election process – it opened the doors towards an integrated, more efficient and democratic lifestyle for the Pakistani citizen.
“The creation of the digitized format of the Electoral Rolls was a great responsibility.” says Muhammad Dilshad, Secretary of the Election Commission of Pakistan. It was more than just responsibility – it was one of the foundations on which the free and fair elections were to be carried out. “The assurance of a democratic election in any country is heavily dependant on the voting list. Creating a voting list is a legal and constitutional responsibility of Election Commission of Pakistan according to Act 219 of the Constitution.”
Once the digitized lists were done, the ECP was faced with additional pressure to provide all the data in a CD and on the website free of cost. The political parties, who wanted to be able to preview the “quality” of the lists, appealed to the Supreme Court and also forced the companies that were working with them, to make the data available. “The court agreed with them and we had to issue another tender for our website. This allowed Pakistan to become the first country to publish this kind of data online to anyone who inputs their ID card number. The data is accessible and cannot be altered.” comments Muhammad Dilshad, Secretary ECP.
The ECP Project: System and Solution
Planned and deployed by KalSoft, the Election Commission of Pakistan is a massive project comprising of the design, development and deployment of a comprehensive software system for the CERS and management of data. The CERS and Data Management Software pseudo the task of studying and storing data required for the automation process. Once the data is automated it can then be used to support the application development for data entry operations so as to enter and store, as well as retrieve data whenever required. Since there was little or no legacy system to upgrade from, the infrastructure to allow the implementation of this solution had to first be establishing.
“The ECP contributed by helping with a team of 130,000 who collected the data from 2 crore families across Pakistan.” adds the ECP Secretary.
The principal objective of the project was to provide ECP with an automated system that will allow it to enter data in a secure environment for Electoral Rolls for 2007 and beyond (ER07). Developed on a Microsoft environment and running on an SQL server, the applications have been developed on an ASP model.
“There were several issues in previous electoral system as it was based on paper documentation.” explains Ahmed Tahir Masood, Senior Project Manager at KalSoft. “It was very difficult to manage everything and filter out the valid number of voters. Often, there were problems such as duplication or even invalid ID Cards. Moreover, the old system was not safe and chances of vulnerability were much higher. The Computerized Electro Roll System that we built provides a complete solution to the issues by digitizing and securely sharing the complete database online with all the parties that need to be privy to it.”
“Voter registration has to be regularly updated for obvious reasons. It is inconceivable to imagine that the ECP had been managing the voter lists manually. How do you preserve the integrity of the data?” continues Tahir. “For example, when the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18, managing the update wasn’t something you should have to worry about on a manual basis. Keeping in mind the that external influences alter the criteria at any point, we embarked on the development of a system that would not just digitize the data, but also make it easier for the ECP to manage the new applications in digital and uninterruptible formats.
KalSoft provided the ECP with technology for digitizing both the previous as well as the new voters. Moreover, they provided a solution that would fulfill all their needs in the future. This includes the registration of new voters, the draft list that are issued before the elections, maintaining their records and to maintain the final list. There is an ongoing process, which includes certain articles of ECP, and several other processes that we have automated. Therefore, we have provided them a solution to make them capable of managing the enterprises and various other matters within their own enterprise; they could enhance their communication and collaboration and easily share their data with respective departments.”
EXCLUSIVE interview with Kanwar Muhammad Dilshad, Secretary, Election Commission of Pakistan
Secretary Dilshad explains that the objective of the Computerized Electoral Rolls System was to make clean, legible, computerized electoral rolls of high accuracy available to the public and other stakeholders. “This would form the basis for the electorate to cast their ballots.”
“Under the dynamic leadership of Quaid-i-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah” begins ECP Secretary, Kanwar Muhammad Dilshad, “Pakistan’s journey towards democracy began when it became an independant nation in 1947. In fact, democracy is a way of life. It is reflected in our attitude, in our perceptions and in our actions. By working together for the noble cause of strengthening the democratic culture across the country, I am confidant that we will be able to achieve the desired goals in the foreseeable future. We should have no doubt in our minds that future of Pakistan rests upon the strengthening of our national institutions and the development of a true democratic culture and political system in the country.”
The Election Commission plays a pivotal role in establishing democratic system in the country. Election Commission is charged with the fundamental responsibility of holding elections in the country in fair and transparent manner with complete neutrality and impartiality. After these elections Pakistan is being considered as one of the first world democracy states.
The preparation of accurate and credible electoral rolls is the first step towards conducting fair, free and transparent elections. The manual system of maintaining electoral registers containing hundreds of millions of records was a frightening task, but the possibility of computerizing this task, was a ray of light at the end of a long tunnel. The Election Commission of Pakistan was committed to maintain accurate and authenticated electoral rolls. To manage the countrywide rolls, the Computerized Electoral Rolls System was developed and is being implemented on a turn-key basis through our implementation partners, KalSoft Joint Venture.
The Secretary explains, “The Computerized Electoral Rolls were successfully used during the Elections 2008 and the voter database will continue to be updated for upcoming Local Government and future General Elections.” For the successful development and implementation of this challenging task, USAID provided the requisite assistance for this time-bound, mission critical task. On behalf of USAID, IFES provided technical assistance for this gigantic project. As you know, the IFES possesses a broad knowledge-base with in-depth expertise in the electoral processes and reforms in more than 100 countries.”
Dilshad sahib emphasized that in order to keep pace with the modern democratic world, the Election Commission of Pakistan incorporated modern electoral commodities (such as the translucent ballot boxes with tamperproof seals and portable voting screens) and adopted internationally practiced techniques for the training of polling personnel including the Returning Officers, with the assistance of USAID, UNDP and international donor community. “The ECP engaged the NGOs and CSOs to create awareness amongst the masses about the voter registration and voter participation, electoral processes and importance of democracy. Preparation of the first-ever computerized electoral rolls by the ECP, its placement on Internet through ECP website for public information and provision of electoral rolls DVDs to the political parties and contesting candidates, availability of Polling Stations data and Election 2008 consolidated results on the Internet have been hallmark achievements of the ECP.
If someone is out of the city or country, he can search his voter details through Computerized National Identity Card, Name and Electoral Area and Household and Serial Number. For a secure environment and high bandwidth, we shifted our website to highly credible Servers outside Pakistan.”
“This” he continues, “helped us to manage the immense number of hits from around the world, specifically during the elections. This resulted in the enhanced transparency and credibility of Elections 2008. These innovations have been acknowledged by the stakeholders like, political parties, candidates, the electorates, civil society, media, national and international election observers.”
The equipment that USAID supplied to the ECP included servers, system software, network management systems, data storage and backup devices, firewalls, network accessories and UPS units. To ensure fast-access, secured and dedicated connectivity between Secretariat and Provincial Offices, high-speed optical fiber and satellite data communication systems are being installed. For transfer of technology and to ensure smooth operations and maintenance of the equipment, necessary training has already been successfully conducted by Intel to the ECP IT professionals.
What is your vision for the project? What else you can do with this data? “Information technology is considered a critical requirement for any organization which is dynamic in its outlook, progressive in style, innovative in approach and responsive to change. The computerization is a continuous process, though we can achieve certain milestones. The Computerized Electoral Rolls System has to be extended to the ECP country-wide District Offices who are actually responsible for voter registration. For this purpose the IT infrastructure has to be strengthened, staff technical expertise has to be nurtured and application software modules have to be developed and continually tweaked.”
“Our vision is to optimally use information technology to implement a transparent layer into the electoral system. Once automated, the gloomy picture a lot of ‘issues’ will automatically be eliminated. We are currently working on numerous projects to develop comprehensive management information system based on databases and geographical information systems at the country-wide ECP Offices. With the computerized system in place, we will be able to instantly provide the information related to the elections. The latest addition will include services on the web, mobile and telephony to increase the interaction between the process and the people. Where there is more interaction and secure accessibility, there will also be an increased accountability.”
The ECP is committed to employ information technology as a strategic resource. There is a critical need to plan a highly sophisticated Electoral Management System, integrating the Computerized Electoral Rolls System with the Polling Stations System and Election Results System (Constituency and Polling-Stations); and placing the vital election information on-line (such as fetching the personal details on the Electoral Rolls, finding the location of assigned Polling Station for vote casting, and availability of Election Results) for public access through the Internet and Cellphones says the Secretary. “This will enhance the credibility and transparency of electoral processes and facilitate the stakeholders.”
Talking the Technology with Ahmed Tahir Masood, Senior Project Manager at KalSoft
What does “digitally enabling’ a voter actually mean? By ‘digitally enable’ a voter I mean that the information of a particular voter is being provided in a single digital form. The digital database is accessible to all the ECP officers that are in four provinces and Secretariat. This data is maintainable and allows for traceable changes.
On-paper documentation has its obvious flaws, but online isn’t without it’s set of challenges. In a traditionally paper environment, we needed something that was simple enough to access and extract specific bits of data for the specific user accessing it.
There are different national and international bodies that monitor these activities. People from different departments need different types of details which is a constant task for the ECP to keep up with. Digital formats of this data enable easy sharing and quick, secure access. There is a large difference between acquiring all the data from the papers with the use of a few mouse buttons. That is why they digitized this data so that it could be easier for them to arrange all that data and plan their decision accordingly. We wanted to facilitate the public with those decisions by providing them relevant information at the click of a button.
Tell us about the software? What actually have you provided to ECP? It sure isn’t an ordinary data entering solution. Would you like to brief about this product?
We have provided the solution in two parts. The first phase was called ER07, the results on which the last election took place. We collected the data by using an application that was specially designed for data entry to execute the data entry operation. A site was developed which worked 24×7, a daily three continuous shifts with data entry operators and more than 2200 data entry personnel. There were certain rules and checks applied on the basis of which we captured all the data.
The second application CERS has various checks and balances, this application acts as a custodian of the data captured in Phase 1 which was ER07 and on top of that it enables election commission to execute their processes on that data using CERS (Computerized Electoral Rolls System). It was envisioned as a web-based application, which ECP can access from anywhere whether it is on district level or provincial.
In Pakistan, the CNIC (National Identity Card) is used for identification and it is already available to all of us. There are certain checks and integration points in our system which can validate a particular voter record from NADRA’s records. Due to circumstances beyond our control, the ECP’s data was irreconcilable with NADRA’s in time, but we’re hoping to achieve this in the next phase if NADRA allows ECP to gain access to their data.
There are certain other features that prompt us when a specific data matches with some other data when the new entries of voters are being added. It provides the facility to flag that particular voter and in the future, it can be tracked down easily. System has various performance reporting systems on the basis of which various checks and balances are implemented to maintain the uniqueness of a voter thought the nation.
Why you used your own sources to import the data? Doesn’t NADRA already have this data available?
We gathered, verified and imported the entire data because NADRA’s data has not been collected from every corner of Pakistan. Secondly, voter-related data has more attributes associated with it than what NADRA has to offer so a NADRA record does not completely fulfill the requirement. Our data collection operation was a tremendous effort, conducted door-to-door whereas in case of NADRA, this was not the case. Further, the decision to not go to NADRA was made because though every voter in Pakistan doesn’t have new National ID Card however every eligible voter, to the best of our abilities, is registered in the vote bank.
We entered the voters with old NICs but also tagged them for future processes. The Election Commission has its own vision and strategies to resolve these issues in the future and our system will enable them to do just that.
What is the size of Data Set?
Overall, our data center is the biggest data center in Pakistan. Not even the NADRA has such a big data collection as we have. The sizes differ in different stages as some data is shown as transitional data.
At one stage, the size of data exceeded 240 GB. After filtration, the approximate data size sits at 200 GB. The number of voters that we have online is close to 81 million.
The Platform of Software? Security measures? The issue of security starts when the infrastructure is being established. We developed a virtual pattern network with 128-bit encryption. We have also applied other security measures to preserve the sanctity of the data. The software has been developed on a Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0, C# & ASP.Net 2.0 and the largest implementation of SQL Server 2005 in Pakistan. We worked in close coordination with Microsoft to provide and enable Connected Government Framework (CGS) in Pakistan for this project.
The size of the project is huge! What was the biggest challenge in the execution?
Time. Developing a Management Information System to match the requirements at hand was challenging enough, however with the challenge meaning on-time completion because the integrity of the entire election process was resting on the accuracy of the software, that puts the challenge up several notches higher!
According to the Secretary of the ECP, the Election Commission of Pakistan has always felt the need of upgrading our system and that is why we included one more wing in our system that is called Information Technology Wing. We requested an IT staff from the government which included IT engineers, managers and technical officers so we established a high power information technology wing in secretariat. We also completed these wings in all four provinces of country.
UNDP had established a project for the ECP back in 1997 which was aimed at managing democratic processing. It enhanced ECP’s capacity building LDC to Deputy Election Commission level and suggested that there must be a computerized system put in place. “They provided computers to the key officers, top management, middle management and lower management” explains the Secretary “and also arranged their trainings in different institutes. They trained more than 1500 of our staff. In 2005 when our officers had acquired the skills they needed, we created an IT Wing.”
The UNDP’s foresight played a strong role in the HR capacity building and establishing of the ECP’s basic infrastructure which made the transition from old to new, slightly easier.
The Future Prospects
The system has been developed keeping in mind applicable implementations in other third world countries. The Computerized Electoral Rolls is an ongoing initiative and a tremendous learning experience for the Election Commission of Pakistan as well as every citizen. To be able to manage the successful integration between the democratic process and the technology must have been an immense feat. For a Pakistani company to deliver a working solution that fits so well in the fabric of the greater good, is a tremendous accomplishment.
But as with every major accomplishment and learning experience, the technology opens our eyes towards how innovation can make even the automated processes, better. With its immense experience, KalSoft has offered certain recommendations to the ECP and the Government of Pakistan, which will make the solution more of an experience rather than just a gargantuan collection of code:
• Improvement in the functioning of Display Centers including increasing compensation to the staff manning display centers.
• The voter lists should be reconciled with the NADRA database to ensure and authenticate each entry’s personal information.
• NADRA should also be directed to ensure issuing CNIC (Computerized National Identification Card) to all eligible persons. The Government should declare a period of 6 months or longer in which CNICs will be issued by NADRA without charging any fee.
• Provisional Electoral Rolls List should be made available online while the final Voter List should be made available online at all times like it was during the elections.
• The cleaning of Electoral Rolls database is as essential as its initial establishment. There must be a Standing Operating Procedures (SOPs) mechanism in place to clean this database from the municipal data to delete the names of the deceased person from the master database of the Electoral Rolls. All the municipal corporations should provide the updated data to the ECP on monthly basis.
• The Computerized Electoral Rolls eventually must be deployed in the Assistant Election Commissioner’s offices of the respective districts. It is need of the time to build a strong IT infrastructure between the ECP/PEC and AECs offices to make whole system fully automated and secure online connectivity over high speed fiber optics data link.
• Implement the Complaint Management System at all the levels and this software should be connected with all the PECs offices and the ECP Secretariat
• The ECP must set firm policy to implement a foundation rule of Computerization which is the use of Unique Identifiers for the voters. And this Unique Identifier is Computerized National Identify Card Number. Without this universally allocated number, the computerization process will have been done in vain.
There is seldom news more exciting than that which demonstrates the implications of automation and integration. For a project to be executed at the level of the ECP, the project isn’t a great win for just one company, rather a great win for an entire country. There are obviously a lot of lessons to be learned but projects such as these enable an industry to move forward in its entirety.
