Through this newspaper, I want to draw your attention to the surprising 2024 elections in Pakistan. The election, held on February 8 after two years of political turmoil and a months-long delay, was both marred and hopeful.
Election day began with internet and cellular services cut off under the pretext of security after two terrorist attacks the previous day killed at least 28 people in Balochistan. This was also expected to disrupt turnout, but more than 61 million voters showed up at the polls, and the voter turnout was 48 percent.
The election result, which took a few days to come in, was a stunning upset: candidates backed by Khan’s PTI won a plurality of parliamentary seats (93 out of 266), though not an outright majority. The party alleges that it would have won more seats were it not for interference by the authorities.
Party officials cited major discrepancies in polling station versus constituency-level results (the former did not add up to the latter), unexplained delays in vote counting and results being tabulated (results stopped coming in abruptly on election night), and the fact that some candidates ‘lost’ major vote leads reported on election night by the next morning.
The Free and Fair Election Network, an election observer, noted that its election agents were not allowed to observe the result tabulations in about half of the electoral constituencies; in dozens of other constituencies, the candidates and their election agents were also prevented from observing the vote tallies (as is their right under Pakistan’s election rules).
ZAINAB MEHFOOZ,
Karachi.
