icegov2012 proceedings

number [10]. Keeping in view that multiple voters may use one
mobile phone in a household to verify their vote and to protect the
privacy of the voter, the name, parentage and home address which
are attributes of CNIC are not included in the return SMS.
The block code is the assigned block or colony number allotted
after the new housing census of 2011 as mentioned before. The
serial number replaces the old manual slip system that was issued
to every voter with the serial number and name upon registration.
The idea of digitally replacing the paper slip system intends to
save cost and paper waste and also reduces the chances of
misplaced slips. Another important issue it helps address is a
voting malpractice, which was often reported in rural areas with
illiterate or inexperienced voters. It is observed during elections in
Pakistan that political party agents canvassing outside polling
station would try to influence the voter in the guise of providing
support to inexperienced voters [20]. With a new digitised version
of electoral rolls, voters only need to carry their CNIC and newly
issued serial number via digital electoral rolls to polling stations
and cast their ballot. It shall , however, be noted that physical
display of electoral rolls will continue side by side in order to
ensure that no voter is denied this right. The electoral roll
verification drive ended on March 20, 2012.
5. ECP-NADRA SMS APPLICATION
ANALYSIS
It is perhaps the first time in Pakistan that a number of
governmental agencies namely, the ECP, NADRA and the
Population Census Organisation have cooperated with one another
in order to make a digital electoral roll. The Pakistani voters’
uptake on this service was considerable in both rural and urban
sectors. With mobiles, virtual display centres for a small price
could be created anywhere at the convenience of the voter.
Indicative of the demand shift in the new service delivery, voters
opted to use the SMS service and the display centres were not
crowded, making it easier and speedier to deal with modification
complaints of effected voters. Within 17 days of the launch of the
application, 4.6 million people had used it to verify their electoral
details [28]. By end of March 2012, the number of verified voters
exceeded the 7 million that used this facility.
The SMS service serves as an auxiliary provision that enabled the
8.4% registered voters in Pakistan. However, this level of
collaboration will be able to open new areas of interagency
collaborations, which actually could be considered as the third and
fourth phase of horizontal and vertical integration, if compared
with the Layne & Lee model of e-government. Similarly, the SMS
service has landed the ECP in the Guinness Book of World
Records for having the World’s largest voter verification SMS
service with a voter density of 83.28 million [31]. Introducing this
application on an even bigger network of almost 111 million
mobile users in one go, relying on indigenous technology and
skills without physical external assistance bodes well for
developing countries and their m-government plans. As of 2012,
the ECP plans to launch the same SMS service to announce and
inform voters of their allocated polling stations before the national
elections are conducted.
An instance of this provision was observed in July 2012, after the
dismissal of the then Prime Minister Gillani by the Supreme Court
of Pakistan. His seat in the Pakistan National Assembly eventually
fell vacant and bye-election had to be held. Here the ECP
provided information to over 138,000 voters in that constituency
162
using location based targeting and its new CERS II rolls to SMS
voters their block codes, polling station names and numbers and
serial numbers.
The architecture behind the SMS application is a G2C
informational exchange initiated by texting a short code- a C2G
pull communication. On the front end, it is a text-based
communication on the GSM cellular network in a local language
and numbers. The middleware is a NADRA SMS Gateway. All
the Mobile Network Operators (MNO) have reserved short code
8300 for the ECP. Once a network operator receives an SMS, it
passes the message to the NADRA SMS gate way. In return, if the
message is appropriate (i.e. if it contains 13 digits of CNIC) the
voters’ information is returned.
If this application is analysed against the Task-Technology Fit
model [13], it can be argued that the ECP-NADRA’s application
is a useful one in a way that a huge chunk of the target audience is
available on the employed platform, the task (here informational)
can be viably transmitted. Given the text-based informational
request in a mobile and geographically diverse target area, with a
varied skill set and technical abilities and round the clock access
to ensure all voters could verify their status within the 20-day
period- this match serves a useful proposition for the SMS
verification system. Had the ECP launched a website version of
this application then, , the application would not have even
achieved the 8.3% of audience due to limited internet penetration
in Pakistan as compared to the mobile phone subscription as
indicated in Figure 1. Building up on the location-based facility in
m-government, the future plan to inform voters of their designated
polling stations through a similar SMS based application may also
be successful, which was test run in the bye-elections of
constituency Multan-IV as pointed before.
Incorporation of an external facilitator or technology provider in a
highly sensitive national affair such as the national election is not
desirable [19] especially with regard to credibility and neutrality
of an election body. By hiring an indigenous public firm on a
formal contract to implement both the software and hardware ends
of a project, while keeping check and balance on the tailored
solution, ensured control with the contractee. The digitisation of
voters’ registration roll brought together not only the government
officials but also IT experts to ensure that the design phase does
not suffer from the absence of experts from both ends. Brewer
et.al. [5] have argued that the combination of bureaucracy and
technology experts would minimise the pitfalls in an egovernment
application. The ECP relied on NADRA’s
accumulated experience of over 10 years in the automation and
biometric business. A unique factor was that NADRA customized
a data image of its CNIC and appended the CERS I with it to
create CERS II. Such a multiagency cooperation for interagency
information sharing can be extended and scaled to further future
projects [35].
Ideally, there should not have been any costs involved for an
SMS, but to avoid jamming of the SMS service by miscreants the
ECP decided to keep a minimal cost. Despite the lower cost of
SMS, it may still prevent the marginally poor people from
availing it. However, the government did not abandon the paper
display of electoral rolls to ensure no citizen is missed out.
Security and trust though remain tangible issues to be addressed
as with all e-government initiatives- establishing an identity
versus the anonymity of a citizen have confounded electronic
notions of governance and elections [19].