Supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party demonstrate in Peshawar on Friday against alleged vote rigging and calling for the release of full results from Thursday’s general election without further delay. The Pakistan Election Commission began dribbling out results early Friday after a 12-hour delay. Photo by Bilawal Arbab/EPA-EFE
Vote counting was continuing Friday in Pakistan’s general election with early results indicating former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek e-Insaf party carving out a narrow lead, followed by the Pakistan Muslim League and the Pakistan People’s Party.
With around 140 of 855 contests for national and provincial assemblies seats declared a day after polling stations closed, independents, mostly PTI-affiliated, had won 60 seats followed by the PMLN with 43 seats and the PPP with 37. Advertisement
Among those who won or retained one of the 266 National Assembly seats up for grabs were PMLN leader, three-time former prime minister of Pakistan and favorite to become its next leader Nawaz Sharif, his brother Shehbaz Sharif who was prime minister from 2018-2023, and PPP leader Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of the assassinated leader Benazir Bhutto and grandson of party founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
PTI acting Chairman, Gohar Ali Khan, comfortably won his seat in Punjab’s Faisalabad, the country’s third-largest city, with 110,023 votes.
However, party founder and leader Imran Khan was unable to run after being slapped with a 10-year political ban Jan. 31 and could only monitor proceedings from his cell in Rawalpindi Prison, Islamabad, where he is serving multiple sentences for corruption and leaking state secrets. Advertisement
Election officials blamed a delay in finalizing the result, which was expected late Thursday or Friday morning, on an Internet outage but the PTI rejected the explanation with party spokesperson Raoof Hasan accusing authorities of tampering and alleging that votes had been “stolen”.
The interior ministry, which also disabled cell phone and data networks for 9 hours, said the risk of terrorist attacks made blacking out the Internet necessary.
The Election Commission rejected a PTI request to keep polling stations open after the 5 p.m. cutoff time despite multiple reports of irregularities and the communications blackout.
Authorities defended the running of the poll saying they had significantly boosted the number of voters to 128 million, more than half of the entire population, stationed 1.4 million election workers at 90,675 polling stations –16,766 of which were declared as being at risk of violence — and made it easier for people to vote by making polling day a public holiday.
Hundreds of thousands of troops and police were out in force on the streets and at polling stations across the country and borders with Iran and Afghanistan were temporarily shut after the run-up to the election was marred by violence and claims of vote-rigging. Advertisement
