Your election fever might suddenly disappear if you reach your polling station on election day only to find that your vote has already been cast by someone else.

In a country where electoral malpractice comes in many shapes and forms (and according to some people is part and parcel of the polling process) identity theft is just one of many ways voters can lose their right to express their will.

However, the Election Commission of Pakistan has already made a special provision for this scenario to make sure no one is excluded.

Section 77 of the Election Rules of 2017 is dedicated to ‘Tendered votes’. Tendered here means a vote already cast.

So if you reach a polling station and tell the polling officer your National Identity Card number, and they find that your ballot paper has already been taken, stamped and cast into a box, and you still don’t have a mark on your thumb, you are going to be asked to prove your identity.

If you present a valid CNIC and prove that it is indeed who you are claiming to be, you will be issued a tendered ballot paper.

The Presiding Officer will also obtain your thumb impression and signature on Form-43, a form dedicated to tendered votes.

You will then be allowed to stamp your ballot paper in privacy. However, the satisfaction of casting the ballot into the box will not be granted to you.

Instead, the officer will take your vote and put it in a special envelope for tendered votes.

What happens to the original ‘fake’ vote?

If you manage to prove your identity to the Presiding Officer, this means that the vote already cast in your name has been proven to be illegal.

However, it also needs to be remembered that a ballot is cast without any identification marks. So as long as the fake vote has been cast validly, meaning that the stamp is correctly placed in one box, it will count.

The Presiding Officer will locate the counterfoil issued to the impersonator, which still has his thumb impression, to the ECP.

The ECP will then work with NADRA to locate whoever has cast the impersonated vote. Action will also be initiated against the person whose negligence led to the vote being cast.

However, it should also be noted that in case you claim your vote has already been cast but fail to prove your identity, you could be penalised.

At the time of counting

Now that both votes, fake and impersonated, have been cast, they will count towards the total of each candidate.

However, the tendered votes will be counted separately and then returned to their separate bag after the count.

A separate column is made for the tendered votes in Form-45, which displays the final count. Therefore, each constituency’s result will show the difference tendered votes have created in its total.