Ever since the inception of Pakistan, inheriting it from the colonial rulers, the tussle of power and the consistent tug of war is no secret to any observer of the country's history. But with the disposal of the British rulers, we unfortunately decided to sustain the mechanisms they left behind for us. In effect, we changed the characters behind the reigns and not the faulty instruments of governance.

Over the years, institutional reform has been a slogan for different parties, with the current Tehreek-e-Insaf government particularly ecstatic about the idea. With ideas of Medina and developments of the United Kingdom, the government hopes to prepare solutions for the country's miseries.  

A central target of criticism while the current government's party was in opposition, was the most fundamental institution of the country, the Parliament or Majlis-e-Shura.

Along with the parliament, its proceedings and effectiveness, the Election Commission of Pakistan and the election procedure as a whole has been a debate among many issues brought to the light in PTI's campaigns.

But a central question untouched for several elections now is the legitimacy of an election, its procedure and legislative institution formed on the basis of minority involvement from the public.

Though we feel no hesitation flaunting the meager voter turnout that barely crosses the 50 percent mark, we fail to acknowledge that among the 5 crore out of over 10 crore voters, only a sum slightly more than 1/5th of the total cast vote and 1/10th of the total registered vote is behind the winning party, that too including a great majority of votes from constituencies from where they lost, hence the winning party virtually makes government in much lesser than 1/10th of the total votes or much less than 1/5th of the cast votes because in constituencies where their candidates do not win, the vote is virtually useless and makes no difference to the outcome of the election whatsoever.

An interesting example of further disparity created through the under and over representation of the system is observable in the vote to seat ratios of various parties. For the 2018 General Elections, the Mutahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) carried 733,245 votes, the Awami National Party (ANP) got 815,998 votes while the Tehreek-e-Labaik (TLP) received 2,234,316 votes. The MQM got 6 general seats in assembly, ANP carrying around 1 lac votes over MQM, got only one seat, where as the TLP, carrying 6 lac 85 thousand votes more than the votes of MQM and ANP combined, carried no National Assembly seat at all.

The obvious reason for this almost ridiculous disparity in representation is that we treat constituencies instead of votes as the central pivots in elections.

Instead of total voter behind an idea or representative, the ration of the people or the subjective concentration of a certain group of people in the bounds of geographical contingencies and coincidences are given such importance that this disparate division of constituencies ends up silencing real voices turning them in to mere numbers on the wrong side of the balance.

The last Electoral Reform Bill debate, that floated into a religious issue on the question of alleged malafide change in the pattern of the Member of Assembly's oath, overpowered any view over the rest of the dynamics of the bill. Among the greatest procedural flaws that the Bill provides is something that the legislators miserably failed to fix.

The legislation gives room for no more than 10 percent deviation of population among the size of the constituencies or electoral districts.

The wisdom behind this section is to equalize the units of representation i.e the constituency or electoral district so as to equalize the voices of behind each legislator in assembly. Though this limitation could not be followed in almost 90 constituencies, forming an apparent discrepancy in voter power through the country but the real causative would still have subsisted even if the population would have been equalized through the entire state in each constituency.

The population of the people does not form a clear relation to the number of voters, of course the higher the population, the more likely it is to have more voters, but taking in to account the fact that only half of the population is of registered voters (and that further only half of them vote), and that registered population too varies from region to region, hence equalizing the population of the constituencies does not leave much actual impact in terms of equalizing the authority of the vote.

For true democratic change in Pakistan, the population needs to realize and the policy makers need to acknowledge the fact that votes represent real voices and real people, that elections are not exercise of division and competitions of subjugations but mechanisms of establishment of fair representation and that geographical contingencies are not more important than the harmony of the greater federation.

As soon as we realize that a system where whoever crosses the post first wins and an election where a majority of the people are under represented in the name of majority rule and where hardly one tenth or even one fifth of the population can decide the future of the state alone, is a system of repression and division. No matter how much we reassure ourselves with examples of America and the United Kingdom and other similar systems, a democracy working at its 20 percent is no more a dependable system, at its best it is a mechanism of alienative representation.

These facts are specifically effective in developing democracies such as our's, where as over the past century a great majority of the democratic world has switched over to or developed their own forms of  Proportional Representation Systems (PR). Among these 87 countries include Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungary and Italy.

But before we find ways to give the voices of the country's voters real meaning, we must realize there are other ways to politics then whatever the US or the UK follows. The sooner we realize this, the faster we give voice to the diverse population of the country that is being alienated ever more by a flawed and selective system.