Do We Vote Map- Elections Mapping in Pakistan

Cross posting from my blog post at www.pakreport.org/dowevote blog

Higher turnout makes the democratic governments more strong, and at the same time makes Governments more accountable to the people of the country.

In any democratic system voters Turnout is the most common and probably most important component of the individual’s participation in the Political process. Economic, demographic, cultural, natural, technological and institutional factors effect the voters turnout in a country. However, one agreeable fact is that higher voters turnouts provide legitimacy to the elections and Governments

In recent Egypt elections more more than 70% of the voters participated in the first and second stage of the elections. That shows the will of the people to drive change in the country. Today, Pakistan is at a very crucial stage in its very short democratic life span. History has shown that most of the people in Pakistan do not take part in the elections; showing their lack of belief in the change through electoral process. In Pakistan, the highest voters turnout(55%) was observed in 1955 elections.

As maps with the interactive statistics are the right tools to tell story on the Internet today, our team compiled 2008 National assembly data and created the interactive chart to show how many percent of voters take part in elections in 2008 and launched http://www.pakreport.org/dowevote. You can zoom the map to the district level to see how many of us take part in the electoral process from each part of Pakistan.

The map shows the parts of the country where voters turnout ranges from 12.8% (Bajur Agency) to 67.33% (Bhakkar) percent.

Our efforts are to demonstrate that low voters participation is not a path forward to change in our country. Higher participation of the common people in the elections and steps of the Government to make voting easy for every one are the key factors to sustain democracy in Pakistan. DoWeVote map is first effort and we need your involvement and feedback to take this step forward.

We hope we will see more active participation from people of Pakistan in electoral process and higher voter turnouts in next elections!