All stakeholders satisfied with electoral reforms body, says Dar

Minister for Finance and Chairman Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reforms Ishaq Dar has said all the political parties were involved in the process of electoral reforms and were satisfied with the progress. Talking to a news channel, the minister said that the committee had conducted 14 meetings while its sub-committee having members of legal back-ground met 51 times, besides 65 meetings held with the relevant institutions and other stakeholders till now and had reviewed seven laws related to the election process in the country. He said the "Unified Election Act" and the "Unified Election Rules" were in the final stage. Ishaq Dar said that the committee was waiting for the report of the sub-committee about the matter of right of vote for the overseas Pakistanis. He said the committee had received recommendations of about 4500 pages from different sections of the society regarding electoral reforms. The minister said another sub-committee headed by Arif Alvi of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was constituted to give recommendations on voting rights for overseas Pakistanis, use of electronic voting machines and bio-metric verification of the voters. He said, "We need 300,000 machines for electronic voting and a single machine costs minimum $ 1000." He said the final draft about electronic voting, right to vote for overseas Pakistanis and electoral reforms will be presented in the Parliament in coming months.