Pakistan 2024 General Election

The Election Commission declared PTI ineligible for a symbol on 22 December 2023 under section 215(5) of the Elections Act for failing to hold intra-party elections, and on 13 January 2024, the day fixed in the election programme for the submission of party certificates and the allotment of symbols, a three-judge Supreme Court bench set aside the Peshawar High Court order and restored the Commission's decision. That much is undisturbed. In the reserved-seats appeals a majority of eight of the thirteen judges of a Full Court then declared, in a short order of 12 July 2024 with detailed reasons on 23 September 2024, that the absence of a symbol does not affect a party's right to contest, that PTI 'was and is a political party which secured or won general seats', and that the recording of PTI candidates as independents on Form 33 and in the section 98 notification, together with the Commission's Explanation to Rule 94 of the Elections Rules, were unlawful acts and omissions of the returning officers and the Commission. On 27 June 2025 a Constitutional Bench allowed review petitions by a majority of seven, set that judgment aside, dismissed the Sunni Ittehad Council's appeals and restored the Peshawar High Court judgment, so the 2024 holding no longer stands as law. What is not disputed on either side of that litigation is the sequence of administrative facts: the symbol was refused, and the candidates were listed and notified as independents.

Freedom House records a nationwide suspension of mobile internet of about ten hours on 8 February 2024, with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority telling a court in March that the Ministry of Interior had requested it and that the Authority was legally obliged to comply, and with the Sindh High Court having ordered in January that uninterrupted access be maintained up to election day. The Election Commission's press release of 12 February attributes the loss of communication to the shutdown, and the Commonwealth Observer Group concludes that the shutdown 'was responsible for the failure of the Election Management System', so that results were not transmitted digitally as section 13 of the Elections Act requires and were carried and tabulated by hand instead.

FAFEN, whose observers covered 12,177 polling stations, found voting and counting largely free of controversy but concluded that the delay in preparing and announcing preliminary results 'overshadowed an otherwise orderly election, raising questions about the credibility of the election outcome'. The Commonwealth Observer Group found that by the end of the 14-day window set by sections 95(10) and 98(2) of the Elections Act full sets of Forms 45, 46 and 47 had not been uploaded, and criticised the Commission's relative silence in the four days after the poll, which allowed speculation and purported evidence of manipulation to fill the information void.

The Commonwealth Observer Group reviewed documentation appearing to show that Forms 45 submitted to returning officers differed from the copies given to agents at the polling station, with vote totals and turnout figures altered, and that a significant number of Forms 46 had been altered. It also recorded polling stations where National Assembly turnout far exceeded turnout at the same stations for the intersecting provincial constituencies, a pattern it considered unlikely, citing Pattan-Coalition 38 analysis of a Lahore constituency in which three of almost 70 polling stations appeared to exceed 100 per cent turnout. The Group states that it finds much of the analysis conducted by civil society organisations credible, naming PILDAT, FAFEN and Pattan-Coalition 38, and that at least two media outlets confirmed Pattan-Coalition 38's findings about forms missing from or modified on the Commission's website in July 2024. On those website irregularities the Group adds that it 'cannot establish whether these clerical irregularities owed to mistakes or malevolence'.

NA-251 Sherani-cum-Zhob-cum-Killa Saifullah is the only constituency in which the declared 2024 National Assembly outcome has been reversed. On 27 February 2026 a three-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Shahid Waheed set aside the election tribunal's order for repolling and declared the Pashtoonkhwa National Awami Party candidate, Khushal Khan Kakar, the returned candidate in place of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam candidate originally notified, holding that the returning officer 'had deliberately and unlawfully altered the results of Form 45'. The documents before the Court showed the constituency consolidation understating Kakar's count by about 100 votes at each of ten polling stations and adding to his rival's, and the Election Commission's representative accepted the authenticity of the Forms 45 produced. Of the four petitions accepted by tribunals, all in Balochistan, the other three produced orders for repolling rather than a change of winner.

Section 148(5) of the Elections Act requires a tribunal to decide a petition within 180 days of filing, a deadline that expired in October 2024. FAFEN found that as of 17 August 2024 only 25 of the roughly 333 petitions then counted had been disposed of, an average of about one per tribunal across 23 tribunals, which the Commonwealth Observer Group put at nearly 93 per cent of cases unheard almost six months after the poll. By the end of April 2026 tribunals had decided 246 of 374 petitions, with 128 still pending and none of the Islamabad petitions decided, disposal ranging from 94 per cent in Balochistan to 29 per cent in Sindh. The Commonwealth Observer Group linked part of the Punjab backlog to the Commission's rejection of six tribunals appointed by the Lahore High Court, and criticised two retroactive amendments to the Elections Act passed after the election, one of which allowed the Commission to appoint retired judges to those tribunals.

The Commonwealth Observer Group, citing FAFEN's August 2024 tribunal report, understood there to have been around 333 National Assembly and Provincial Assembly petitions, 188 of them filed by PTI-endorsed independent candidates; FAFEN's own count by April 2026, after further filings and reconciliation, is 374 petitions, of which 206 were filed by PTI-backed independents. The Group expressly declined to compile a list of constituencies in which the accuracy of results is in question, or to go into detail on any particular petition, because that could prejudice the tribunals; it identified types of irregularity instead. As of the end of April 2026 tribunals had accepted four petitions, all in Balochistan, and the declared outcome had been reversed in one National Assembly constituency. No competent body has found that the composition of the National Assembly as a whole was altered by falsified consolidation.

On 17 February 2024 Commissioner Liaquat Ali Chatha resigned at a press conference and alleged that results in Rawalpindi division had been reversed with fake stamps against independents leading by 70,000 to 80,000 votes, implicating the Chief Election Commissioner, Sikandar Sultan Raja, and, as he later confirmed, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Qazi Faez Isa. The Commission rejected the allegations the same day, said no official had instructed any change in results, noted that a divisional commissioner is never appointed a district returning officer, returning officer or presiding officer, and constituted an inquiry committee; the caretaker Punjab chief minister separately ordered a probe. On 22 February Chatha recorded a statement before the Commission's committee withdrawing every allegation as 'totally false, concocted, anti-state, and malicious', saying that a senior PTI figure whom he did not name had offered him a lucrative future position to make them and that the plan had been approved by the party's senior leadership. Two caveats stand against the withdrawal: the committee that took it was constituted by the body the allegations named, and no tribunal or court has independently examined either the original claim or the retraction.

The Commonwealth Observer Group found the civil society analysis of Form 45 discrepancies credible and reviewed documentation appearing to show that forms held by party agents differed from those used in tabulation. The Supreme Court, in a judgment reported on 26 September 2024 on an appeal from the Quetta election tribunal concerning the Balochistan Assembly seat PB-14 Naseerabad-II, held that 'the ballot papers which are cast is the primary evidence of the election result' and that Forms 45 and 47 carry a presumption of correctness until a recount is ordered; on the facts of that case a recount was held, the winner's margin narrowed but held, and the Court recorded that it could not be established that the copies the appellant produced were of the actual Forms 45. The two positions are not a disagreement about what happened in any given constituency — the Court decided one seat on its evidence, the Group declined to reach findings on individual seats — but about what an agent's copy can prove, and both bodies hold to their position.

The Election Commission stated in its press release of 12 February 2024 that the loss of the mobile network caused the communication failure, and the Commonwealth Observer Group treats that release as the Commission's confirmation of the causal link. The Group nonetheless recorded that it 'was unable to ascertain the precise reasons for the failure' and that its understanding was that the Commission's use of a private network should have insulated presiding officers' phones from a shutdown of public cellular service. The Group recommended a post-election lessons-learned review to identify the reason; no published review has resolved the point.

The Commonwealth Observer Group's final report attributes every material concern it raises to domestic actors: the security apparatus, the Election Commission, the courts and the political parties. Imran Khan's assertion that his removal from office in the April 2022 no-confidence vote was the result of a foreign-backed conspiracy concerned that vote rather than the 2024 poll, and it led to his prosecution under the Official Secrets Act in the 'cipher case' rather than to any finding of foreign involvement in an election.

The Group records that some stakeholders accused the state of complicity in disseminating disinformation, that it was told the government had social media sites that had been requested to remove fact-checked information, and that websites verifying or countering state information were said to be reachable only from outside Pakistan. It states of each claim in turn that it 'was unable to verify this claim'. Separately, fact-checkers identified election-related disinformation including deepfake videos, and Meta and TikTok published accounts of their integrity measures, but the Group found no information that would allow the effectiveness of either company's moderation to be assessed.