Voter list and ID cards

A particular point about the plans announced by Chief Election Commissioner ATM Shamsul Huda on Monday is the decision by the EC not to send its personnel from door to door to enlist voters. In an ideal situation, one would have expected the EC to do things the other way round, given that our social conditions are yet to be of the sort that will impel citizens into approaching voter registration camps to have their names included on the voter list. Such conditions are a pattern in the rural interior. Individuals will require to be photographed for the voter list and the national identity card. Such procedures, including digital entries, will as the EC says be dependent on technology and cannot for practical purposes be utilized especially in the villages and also at many homes in urban areas. We see the point, but we are not quite convinced, though, that such explanations will actually induce people in the rural regions to register themselves as voters in large numbers and of their own volition. A mere setting up of such camps will not fulfill the goal of having the largest number of people going there all the way for registration. For that to be done, the authorities should devise a detailed strategy of dispatching Election Commission personnel or local influential people to homes as part of a concerted campaign to acclimatise people to the idea of being registered with the EC. In fact, the acclimatisation process could begin now in order for people to be ready to respond quickly once work on the voter list begins in earnest in August.

Let there be no mistaking the fact that the work the Election Commission has taken in hand is of huge dimensions. Preparing a voter list with photographs and national identity cards will call for uninterrupted, focused work on the part of the EC. The nation expects that focus to be there.

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