Registration for elections completed successfully in Pakistan

Efforts to register hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees living in Pakistan to vote in the upcoming presidential elections finished on Monday with a high level of participation. "We are extremely pleased and we consider the registration process a success," Darren Boisvert, a media officer for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), told IRIN on Tuesday from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Although the process had ended, registration stations would remain open on Tuesday for supervised public viewing of the registration lists. According to the IOM, with an estimated 740,000 Afghans registered to participate in the presidential polls, the four-day Afghan Out-of-Country-Registration and Voting (OCRV) exercise has been the largest out-of-country voting operation for refugees ever held in such a short period of time, according to the IOM. Registration in some areas of the country was not possible due to the limited time available. An estimated 27 percent of the registered voters were women, a figure the IOM did not consider satisfactory. "With only a very short period of time for mobilising women to register and vote, we could not have expected a higher turnout such as that in Afghanistan where the campaign lasted several months," Peter Erben, Director of the IOM's OCVR programme, said. The OCRV success was a result of an intensive awareness raising campaign launched by the IOM involving media, NGOs and Afghan communities in the Pakistani western province of Balochistan, North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Islamabad. "We put out a lot of radio advertisements in Pashto and Dari, and mobilised into the communities to explain the registration process," Boisvert said. The IOM was entrusted with the task of conducting the "out-of-country" Afghan presidential election on behalf of the Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). To carry out the OCRV exercise, the UN agency established 1,650 registration stations in and around some 300 locations in Pakistan, training and equipping some 20,000 staff in Iran and Pakistan. The IOM didn't conduct any Afghan refugee registration process in Iran, since the Iranian authorities did an early registration of Afghans living in the country in 2003. On 9 October, the first presidential elections will be held in Afghanistan and those Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan, expected to be 10 percent of the total electorate, will have the opportunity to vote within the country they are now living in. Some one million Afghan refugees in those countries are expected to vote. In Pakistan, polling stations will open between 7 am and 4 pm. Afghans will have to cast their votes at the same station where they registered and show their registration receipts. "We are using that to eliminate any fraud, and [this] will help us to verify that the one who was registered is the same person who is voting," the IOM official said. In addition, Boisvert said that the registration process was held with no serious security incidents and highlighted the cooperation they received from the Pakistani government. "No one was injured, no one was hurt and obviously that is a level of success," he said.