70pc Pakistani youths in favour of EVMs: PILDAT survey
Zubair Qureshi
About 51.9% of youth surveyed believes that the upcoming General Election of Pakistan will be free, fair & credible while an almost equal number (46.9%) believes otherwise.
According to a survey conducted by Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development And Transparency’s 76.7pc of youth believe that EVMs will be helpful in organising free, fair & credible elections while 22.1% believe they would not be helpful.
Following are the key findings of an opinion survey conducted among the 422 members and alternates of PILDAT
Youth Parliament Pakistan spread over 232 (85.3pc) of total 272 National Assembly Constituencies in addition to Azad Kashmir, Gilgit Baltistan and Overseas Pakistanis. The survey was conducted from April 7 to April 12, 2022.
While debate over usage of EVMs is ongoing, youth shows a favourable stance.
Reasons for low Youth Voter Turnout, Poor Performance of Politicians tops as 42.3% of youth respondents believe that the poor performance of politicians is the key reason for abysmally low youth voter turnout, followed by low level of trust in Political Parties (42%) and the poor past performance of Election Commission (37.5%).
To the question as what makes youth support a political party, 37.9% of the respondents are motivated to support a political party due to its past performance, 36.5% base their support on the party’s election manifesto while 17.5% are motivated by the charismatic head of the party.A large majority supports revival of Students’ Unions across Pakistan as a significant portion (81.1%) of the young respondents agree over students’ unions being allowed once again, in all public and private educational institutes of Pakistan while 16.9% are in disagreement over their revival.
In major challenges faced by Pakistan; Inflation tops the list as ranking the challenges faced by Pakistan today, 48.7% youth believes that inflation is the greatest challenge faced by the country, followed by unemployment (45.6%) and the poor quality of education across educational institutions in the country (36.3%).
