Prime Minister Imran Khan promised to introduce electronic voting in Pakistan for the next general polls, but a 2018 confidential report by NADRA and ECP warned that e-voting would be extremely vulnerable to online attacks if rolled out.

The audit, which was completed in 2018, has remained the most comprehensive assessment of online voting to date in the country. It was kept confidential.

In the 78-page document government officials called Internet voting “a controversial issue”, and added that most “technologically advanced countries in the world have either rolled back online voting or have deliberately chosen not to deploy it.”

“Researchers have discovered vulnerabilities…on such systems (including those deployed in the US, Estonia and Australia) that impacted tens of thousands of votes,” the 2018 audit report read.

In order to prove that online attacks could be a major concern for e-voting, officials conducting the assessment sent fake emails addressed from NADRA, which directed voters to a fake voting website.

The operation, it added, was successful.

Even with ironclad security, the voting process cannot be entirely secured as the attacks will target voters' computers, rather than the voting system.

Voters' electronic devices were “not under NADRA’s control,” the report noted.

However, the report also suggested that if the government must implement e-voting it needs to be rolled out in a phased manner, starting with mock trials and small-scale, non-political elections, and scaled up over a period of years.