Is it big mistake? Pakistan asking a foreign supplier to build our electronic voting machines

Election Commission of Pakistan is going to electronic voting. No any announcement has been made yet but in this regard two tenders released by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).

ECP asked to vendors to bid for 300 biometric verification machines (BVM) in one tender. These machines provided by one vender will be tried out during the by-elections. If successful, the winning bidder will get an order for 300,000 machines for use in the general elections.

The other one tender is asked for 400 electronic voting machines (EVM) followed, in the event of a successful trial, by 300,000 machines for the general election. Both a BVM and an EVM are needed in each polling booth. The BVM will verify the identity of the voter and the EVM will register his/her vote.

Almost all elections in Pakistan are always marred by accusations of vote rigging. So the move toward an electronic voting system is very important. It will go a long way toward addressing the persistent demand by political parties to ensure clean, transparent, easily verifiable elections. But there are drawbacks, if sufficient measures are not taken to protect against them we may end up in worse shape.

In the tender documents tender documents Election Commission of Pakistan It is almost impossible for Pakistani companies to qualify evaluation criteria for bidders, ECP are skewed to favour foreign companies. This is a dangerous mistake. the foreign manufacturer allowed to build into them ‘backdoors’ as it is nature and complexity of the electronic chips that are the heart of such machines. Is it big mistake.