Women in some polling stations stopped from voting in Pakistan

Lahore: Women were stopped from voting in Pakistan’s elections today at some of the polling stations in Punjab and the Taliban stronghold in the northwestern tribal district of North Waziristan, reports said. “Not a single woman cast her vote in Sahiwal’s polling station number 15 where a total of 645 women were registered. “It is a tradition of the villagers to bar women from voting, one which was started by tribal elders 35 years ago,” the Dawn reported. Sahiwal is located in Pakistan’s Punjab province. No woman voter turned out to cast their votes in Lower Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after a jirga decided a day earlier not to allow women to vote in the Lower Dir constituency. [caption id=“attachment_773405” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image used with permission from @ShahzebJillani[/caption] The report added that no women were allowed to cast their votes in NA-156 Khanewal-I’s Mohrhipur polling station. The number of women registered to vote at the polling station was 1,260. In 2008, not a single vote was cast at 564 of over 28,000 women’s polling stations – 55 per cent of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, officials said. There are 86 million registered voters in the country - 37 million are women and 48 million men. However, the percentage does not translate to representation. In 2012, the last year of the previous Government, only 60 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan were held by women. PTI