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Canada helps hide Pakistan’s voter list
Pakistan’s electoral rolls with the names of over 80 million eligible voters have been stored behind firewalls on a secure computer system in Canada to prevent hackers from accessing them.
Pakistani Election Commission secretary Kanwar Dilshad said the organisation had decided to store the electronic versions of the voters’ lists abroad as the country did not have the required infrastructure.
Cronomagic Canada Inc, a Montreal-based data warehouse owned by Pakistani immigrant Hayee Bokhari, was selected to store the electoral rolls, reported PTI.
Pakistan’s parliamentary polls were originally scheduled for January 8, but were put off till February 18 after former premier Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.
Bokhari said the data had been stored in Canada because Pakistan could not meet the security and bandwidth requirements. After spending two weeks collating the data in Urdu, Cronomagic even engaged computer hackers to try and break into the system but they failed, he said.
“It’s a completely locked system,” Bokhari, owner and president of Cronomagic, told CanWest News Service.
Cronomagic’s workers stayed at the company’s offices in Montreal during the Christmas holidays to complete the biggest Pakistani database every assembled.
“Such projects usually involve several companies and this can sometimes create security problems,” said Bokhari, who emigrated from Pakistan 17 years ago and is also the founder of mehndi.com, a popular matchmaking website.
Cronomagic won the contract from Pakistan’s Election Commission, which received technical advice from IFES, a US and UN-funded NGO. The IFES has also advised the Election Commission on how to deal with nearly 1,000 complaints of alleged rigging filed by political parties and individuals.
“But nobody knows how we did it because we did it all ourselves. There is no 100 per cent solution, but in tests that we have run we did all right. Hackers that we deal with it tried to get in and couldn’t,” said Bokhari, owner and president of Cronomagic.
“There was not much money in it but it was a real challenge for my team,” said Bokhari, the only project member in Canada who could read Urdu. “I have always wanted to help Pakistan and I am glad that I have been able to give something back.”
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