ISLAMABAD – Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf is all set to take over the reins of the country after securing 116 seats in the National Assembly, however, there are multiple factors behind the surprise triumph, with technology being the most noticeable one.
Apart from the fraught election campaign led by PTI chief, Imran Khan, the party also tapped the technological frontiers and developed an application to mobilize the voters on the polling day.
https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/opinion/margins-of-victory-vs-rejected-votes-who-benefited/
The tech-savvy party had developed a smartphone application and a database known as the Constituency Management System (CMS) to mine the database, identifying voters by household, narrowing it down to “confirmed” PTI voters, targeting them on the app and ensuring they turned out on election day.
“Work that would take days…is being completed in one to two hours,” Mr Mughal, Asad Umar’s personal secretary said in an interview to Reuters on July 25.
How CMS helped PTI
The phone app and database helped Imran Khan’s party sweep to victory in the nail-biting contest as the party loyalists focused on 150 constituencies, they were confident of victory. They used scanning software to digitize publicly-available electoral voter lists, creating a database.
Through the same data, PTI workers were able to print out parchis, or slips, that voters needed to enter the polling station in a contradiction to PML-N which had to help voters fill the paper slips with a pen.
https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/opinion/a-game-of-votes-some-interesting-stats-about-pakistans-general-elections-2018/
The manual administration meant PML-N workers had to write out millions of slips for the 12.9m voters, stopping them from canvassing or doing other vital work.
The system was devised by former US-based real estate businessman Tariq Din and Shahzad Gul, a tech consultant, however, the early version was not immediately welcomed by PTI.
The revised edition was hailed by Asad Umar, the upcoming finance minister, and Jahangir Khan Tareen and apparently the efforts paid off though interestingly, the party had kept this tech weapon under the wraps.
https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/pakistan/imran-khan-may-take-oath-publicly-at-islamabads-d-chowk-pti-spokesman/
Another factor behind the success of CMS was a WhatsApp message forwarded by the party featuring a message from Imran Khan who himself stressed the voters to use the system.
