Missing Vote / Disenfranchisement
These elections have been confusing, many claim it to be free and fair, while others have a different point of view, though my blog is brim full of stories of the other side I care to only share now my own personal experience at having gone out to vote.
Did I want to vote? Plain and simple NO, Then Why Did I go to Vote? the answer was simply to nullify by vote so no one else could use the ballot. Was it legal? I don’t know? Was it my democratic right? I believe it should be, if I don’t have a candidate worthy of my vote I must have a way to say I do not agree, yet exercise my vote.
All day I had decided not to vote but when stories started coming in about blatant rigging. I scrambled and decided to nullify my vote. I went to my polling station, only to stand there for over an hour hunting for my name and not having found it, despite the fact that I had voted in the past few elections from 1997 and even seconded a candidate in 2002, but this time around I found my name absent from the voting list entirely even not traceable on the ECP Website as well.
Having lost all possible hope of locating my name I returned home at least half satisfied that no one casted a bogus vote on my behalf, but also worried that maybe it was a conspiracy against me (lol). Many may argue that it was my responsibility to go hunting for my name in the electoral lists posted in some gravy government office in some corner of Karachi, I might stand guilty of not having done that, but I believe with all the electronic NADRA database already in place ensuring that it should be easy to automatically register all eligible voters to get listed, let alone put the onus on me to ensure my name appears on the elections list and then on the day hunt through hundreds of pages in a trying to locate my name…. little will I know if I might be listed in the next elections until I brave the bureaucratic red tape to get myself re-registered.
I have definitely been disenfranchised of my right to (nullify by vote) vote [is that possible?]
Who else here did not find their name on the voter list
A must read on WindMills of My Mind – Voting: A Right or A Duty?
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