Pakistan Pre-Election Analysis

This morning, four experts from Pakistan discussed Monday's parliamentary elections live via teleconference with an audience here at CSIS in Washington: Sarwar Bari, Secretary General of Free and Fair Election Network; Islamabad, Pakistan Staffan Darnolf, Country Director, IFES Pakistan; Islamabad, Pakistan Ijaz Shafi Gilani, President, Gallup Pakistan; Islamabad, Pakistan Osama Siddique, lawyer, activist and Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS); Lahore, Pakistan Download the full length audio of the event (75 minutes) and also two short podcasts on the event page. The participants tackled a number of important topics, many of them unfamiliar to most American observers of Pakistan's elections. The discussion included issues, such as the lack of transparency in aggregating votes, the prospect of long delays in seeing an official result, the potential for vote rigging, problems with the voter registration list, and Pakistan’s tradition of allowing individual candidates to contest multiple seats at once. Please attend our Post-Election Analysis on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 from 9:00-10:30am at CSIS. Details here. RSVP to pcrproject@csis.org. Download Dr. Ijaz Gilani's PowerPoint slides, including historical election data and maps, here.