As far as one having input on how others are governed. The idea of democracy is if you and others agree to form a democratic society or live in one, then we will live by a majority of decisions. Where I have the opportunity to convince you to vote a certain way and you do the same towards me. So it is possible that you may be governed in a way that you do not agree with, but it is due to a system that we agreed on.
Of course, you can say that is not how it is in reality in Pakistan, but we are discussing what should be or is better, etc.
Free and Fair Elections
Today, Overseas Pakistanis can’t even order passport printing online. Can Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) be adopted outside Pakistan while they are not used here in Pakistan? The cost of holding elections with EVM adoption is 56 Billion Pakistani Rupees. But more concerningly, the transponder prints form-45 that is connected with the machine anybody can cut its cord. That becomes equivalent to aliens taking away the vote box as they did in Daska.
Lack of Resources
Currently, the registered overseas voters are about 90 Lac. However, according to the logistics viability, if only five thousand people in a day go to the consulate, it gets choked. Even then, depending on their domicile and where they used to live they can vote for certain MNA and MPA candidates as we are a parliamentary democracy and don’t vote directly for a leader. So to say they will all vote for any one party doesn’t make sense to me. There has to be a lot of printing.
The postal Ballot is the most probable issue. Voting by post is usually done before the election somewhat around a month early. Sometimes the Vote difference is less than the rejected votes. This is where the overseas votes can alter the voting results. Look, for example, in the neighboring country of India, the different state’s polls swung because they had multiple delays in voting and thus the earlier results somehow affected the convention of the winning party.
The Case of Easy Manipulation
Let us perform the reverse Engineering of the vote on the General Assembly seats. There are 272 Parliamentarian seats in the National Assembly; whereas, there are only 20-25 seats that have a true bulk of a large populace dwelling outside Pakistan. So, if there are Nine Million overseas Pakistanis then half of them are having valid votes hypothetically (Passport and NICOP requirements) to take into consideration.
Also, we might overestimate the effect of overseas voting. There are around 9 million overseas Pakistanis total, how many will vote, even to assume 50% voter turnout is a lot if you look at our past elections and elections around the world. Although I think that only, 10 lac people would vote out of 90 lac. But the split per constituency by average votes is 9 Million/25 seats. Given the overseas turn out to be roughly fifty, it would mean roughly 62,500 more votes that can be bagged. And then if by per-centile if they are split into the third quartile for the first three candidates, there is a fair 15000 additional votes for the runner-up candidate.
So if the lead difference for the winning local votes is anywhere around this number then the overseas Pakistanis can fair fully change the game regardless of what Party candidate they choose. If at all a candidate with 300,000 votes in their favor gets the additional overseas votes then the candidate ensures just a bigger percentage victory margin. However, the winning margins for PTI disruption remained at 4% whereas the stalwart PMLN margins were more than 15%.
There already is a Time Zone difference for flights between New York and California. So one who takes up a flight can in the last hours of the polling easily swing.
