Hearing a petition filed by former Premier Benazir Bhutto charging the Election Commission of pruning the voters' list from 72 million people in 2002 to 52 million in 2007, a two-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar M Chaudhry asked EC officials to sit with the petitioner's counsel and finalise an acceptable formula to complete the task of enrolling missing voters within a month.
Chaudhry declined to grant the 140-day timeline sought by the EC and said that "under no pretext" elections, scheduled towards the end of 2007, would be postponed, Bhutto's counsel Latif Khosa said after the court proceedings. Khosa said it was disquieting to note that a new voters' list has less number of voters compared to the older one.
While 20 million voters, who figured in the 2002 list, were found missing, another 10 million new voters were expected to have been enrolled as the voting age has been brought down to 18 years.
Friday was the second hearing of the case. During the first hearing last week, the apex court had directed the EC to finalise modalities to enroll the missing voters and report the matter in the next hearing.
For its part, the EC came out with a proposal to update the list in 140 days, which the court said was unacceptable. The EC explained that the less number of voters in the new list was due to pruning of duplicate names and offered to enroll the new voters based on the national identity cards.
Bhutto and many others see the shortened list of voters as a move to put off the general elections, due after the dissolution of national and provincial assemblies on November 14.
The government plans to hold the polls by January. According to the proposal of the EC, the list could be updated only by January, to which the apex court said no.