How to check your polling station (warning, it’s not easy)

For some reason, the ECP has made it very difficult for voters to check their polling stations this year. SAMAA Digital is trying to make this tedious process slightly easier for you.

We found out about the process and how difficult it is from Bareha Abbas, a 20-year-old political science student at LUMS, who posted about the process on Facebook.

She’s originally from Karachi and when she came back to the city for her vacations, she joined a political campaign and wanted to know her polling station. She did a lot of research and finally found out how one can find their polling station but when she told people about it, a lot of them thought she was making it up.

“They said ‘the process isn’t that difficult, Bareha’, so I decided to write everything down in a Facebook post to make it easier.” Her post spread but people are still messaging her and asking about the process. “Most people didn’t know that the electoral area you get in the SMS from 8300 isn’t your polling station,” she said.

“It doesn’t make sense to make the process so complicated,” she said. When you have the 8300 SMS facility, why not tweak it a bit to include polling station information?

“A layperson wouldn’t know what to do with a block code [you get that when you send an SMS to 8300],” she said. “A lot of people don’t even have access to computers, so how will they be able to check their polling stations in these PDFs?” questioned Abbas.

She wants to spread the word and help people find their polling stations but she says she’s just one individual.

How to find your polling station

If you don’t know what your national or provincial assembly constituency is, here’s how to find out:

• You’ll need to visit the ECP website (ecp.gov.pk) to find out your NA and PA constituencies, if you don’t already know them
• On the main ECP page, go to the ‘Election’ tab and select ‘Delimitation’
• Once there, select ‘Final Delimitation 2018’
• Select your province and you will be redirected to a PDF file
• You have to scroll through and find the area where you registered to vote. The constituency numbers and names are on the left and the areas that come under those constituencies are on the right. For example, NA-247 Karachi South-II is made up of Aram Bagh, Saddar, Karachi Cantonment, Civil Lines, CBC and some areas of Garden

To find your polling station, here’s what you have to do:

• First, send your CNIC number to 8300. They’ll send you your nine digit block code
• Once you know your constituency, go to https://www.ecp.gov.pk/frmGenericPage.aspx?PageID=3155 and select your province
• That will redirect you to a Google Docs Drive where you can select the provincial assembly or National Assembly. Your polling station for the national and provincial assembly is the same
• If you select ‘National Assembly’, then find your NA constituency in the folder and click on it. It’ll bring up a PDF file
• Remember that block code? You’ll need to look through the PDF file for your census block code
• Once you find your block code, you’ll find your polling station next to it

Happy hunting!

Article source: https://www.samaa.tv/news/2018/07/how-to-check-your-polling-station-warning-its-not-easy/