Electoral System Of Pakistan Senate Elections 2021

The voting process in the Senate can be complex and it only involves our elected representatives.

The constitutional term of senators is 6 years and every 3 years half of the members of the Senate retire after completing their term and half of the members are newly elected.

The Senate elections in Pakistan are held on the basis of a Single Transferable Vote System (STV), which was introduced in the 19th century by British mathematician Thomas Wright Hill for the very first time.

A single transferable vote is an electoral system. The system has been given different names in different countries, such as the Herculean system in Australia and the Choice Voting system in the United States.

This system is currently in use in Ireland and Malta. In Australia, it elects the Federal Senate. This process is part of proportional representation. In this, all the votes go to the candidates, not to the parties.

The vote is transferable, the voter identifies his candidates as his first and second priority.

In this procedure, the candidate has to get a certain percentage of votes. If the first-preference candidate receives votes at this rate, then the voter’s vote is automatically counted in favour of the second-preference candidate. The candidate also nominates the third preferred candidate.

According to the formula laid down in the election rules, for the golden figure of the number of votes required to win a seat, the total number of members of the Provincial Assembly concerned should be divided by the number of vacant Senate seats in the said province.

A candidate running for any seat without a Golden Figure will be declared successful even if he or she receives the highest number of preferred votes among all the candidates for that seat.

Otherwise, the votes obtained in excess of the Golden Figure will be transferred to the next preferred candidate, and so on.

Due to this transfer of votes, the Senate election is also called the election of transferred votes.

If the candidate obtains a single-digit more than the prescribed golden figure, all additional votes will be transferred to the second-priority candidate. This process will be repeated until the election of 7 senators.

If a voter, ie a member of the Provincial Assembly, forgets a single digit while entering the preferential number from 1 to 20, ie prefers 11 in front of a candidate instead of 10 after 9, then his 9 votes will be counted and after 9 All up to 20 preferential votes will be counted as cancelled.

Under the same formula, the candidate who gets 24 votes from the Sindh Assembly for the general seat will be considered successful.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly will have to get 18 votes for the general seats of the Senate and the Balochistan Assembly will have to get 9 votes.

The entire National Assembly will vote in the two-seat Senate elections in Islamabad.

The candidate who gets the majority of votes in the general and technocrat elections in Islamabad will also be considered successful.

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