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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.
Should Overseas Pakistanis get reserve seats?
So basically anyone that invests in Pakistan should have voting rights. A lot of Overseas Pakistani people also have investments in Pakistan and probably don’t want criminals to eat it all up for which their special constituents/representatives could be held answerable. Some of them although not actively residing in Pakistan still have ties and business to attend to, and thus the choice of Govt. there makes a huge difference. Think of Land Grabbing as the most common complaint.
Constituency Seats for Pakistanis can be an ephemeral solution as discussed by Ishaq Dar, and Abid Sher Ali. For the Halqa Bandi, we then will have to look into the local country or regional laws. You may say that Europe has two constituencies and then the Americas have one and Gulf has four and the Pakistanis reside in the Scandanavian Nations. But what shall be their mandate? How would they be held accountable and according to which law?
Online Voting and Rigging
