ISLAMABAD: The most controversial and farcical general elections in Pakistan’s history concluded yesterday. Despite having the much-touted Election Management System (EMS) at its disposal, the Election Commission of Pakistan failed to complete the count and to release election results within 24 hours after closing of the polling, which is in total violation of the Elections Act 2017.
Denial of election symbol to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) confused a significant number of voters, especially illiterate, which likely increased the percentage of rejected or spoiled ballots in this election. Further, suspension of internet and cellular services throughout the polling day marred the otherwise smooth polling in most districts, as it deprived many voters to find their polling details through the ECP’s facility – 8300. Moreover, and it has negatively impacted the turnout. Remember, most pre-poll opinion polls, including ours, showed more than 80% respondents saying that they would go-out to vote. But the system failed them.
These are some of the findings of our exit-poll and participatory election observation.
PATTAN-Coalition38 – one of the largest and independent election observation groups had conducted three opinion polls and observed the polling on February 8, 2024. On polling day our observers and participatory voters randomly observed more than 600 polling stations of 108 national assembly constituencies.
According to our participatory observation and exit-poll nearly 15% voters could not cast their vote due to: (1) Change in polling station without being informed of the change. (2) Fragmentation of votes of family members and communities to different and/or far-flung polling areas and even constituencies. This resulted in benefitting certain party/candidate and damaging others.
About 11% of the respondents of our exit-poll and participatory observers said the following: 1) They faced some kind of difficulty during polling. (2) Level playing field was not available to all candidates during prepoll period. (3) They were not satisfied with the polling process.
Nearly one-fourth of the participatory observers reported that polling agents of PTI were not present inside the polling booths, while 7% said that someone tried to influence them to vote for a certain party. Our investigation also found vote-buying at 15% of the surveyed locations.
It is worth noting here that Pakistan’s electoral system allows victory even by one vote, which encourages contestants to small scale but widespread rigging, such as vote and CNIC buying, ballot spoiling, shifting of votes to far-flung areas, scattering of family votes across polling areas etc. The purpose has always been to make it difficult to trace the culprits.
While we warmly welcome arrival and presence of international observers and appreciate the constraints under which they observed the polling, we feel necessary to highlight that mere quick observation of polling, meetings with politicians and some civil society groups are not sufficient to comment on a very complex electoral exercise in Pakistan.
Regarding popularity of major parties, PTI appeared to be the most popular party throughout the three surveys (exit poll) that our group had conducted. (See table below).