A phone app and a database of more than 50 million voters were key weapons in the successful campaign of cricket legend Imran Khan in last month’s general election, though rivals allege Mr. Khan also received clandestine aid from the powerful military.
The phone app proved especially useful in getting supporters to the polls when the government’s own telephone information service giving out polling place locations suffered major problems on election day, leaving other parties scrambling. It partly explains why Mr. Khan’s party managed to win tight-margin races.
“It’s had a great impact,” said Amir Mughal, tasked with using the app and database, known as the Constituency Management System (CMS), to elect Asad Umar, a lawmaker who won his seat in Islamabad.
A targeted campaign
The small CMS unit led by Mr. Mughal, Mr. Umar’s personal secretary, was typical of how Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party set up teams in constituencies across Pakistan to mine the database, identifying voters by household, zeroing-in on “confirmed” PTI voters, tagging them on the app, and ensuring they turned out on election day. Developed by a small tech team, the CMS was a key response to Mr. Khan’s bitter complaints after the 2013 poll loss that his party failed to translate mass popularity into votes because it did not know the “art of winning elections”.
150 constituencies
Weeks before the elections, Mr. Khan sent out a video via WhatsApp urging PTI candidates to embrace CMS.
The PTI focused on 150 constituencies it felt it had the best chance of winning. Party workers said they used scanning software to digitise publicly-available electoral voter lists to create the database.
By typing in a voter’s identity card number into the app, PTI workers could see details such as family home address, who else lived in the same household, and where they needed to vote.
In the run up to election day, PTI workers were also able to print out parchis, or slips, that voters needed to enter the polling station. In contrast, workers from the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) had to help voters fill the paper slips with a pen. In a large nation where illiteracy hovers above 40%, that meant PML-N workers had to write out millions of slips for the 12.9 million voters who backed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party, stopping those workers from canvassing or doing other vital work.
“It’s a paradigm shift,” said another senior CMS operator. “We changed the party, turning social media popularity into reality.”