As the nation’s most well-liked leader, Imran Khan, lingered in jail, millions of Pakistanis cast ballots in an election tainted by claims of vote-rigging and the suspension of mobile phone services. As of Thursday, counting had begun.
Surveyors anticipated a low voter participation among the 128 million eligible voters in the nation after a dismal campaign marred by former prime minister Khan’s imprisonment and the dismantling of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party by the ruling military elite.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) is expected to win the most seats in Thursday’s vote, with analysts saying its 74-year-old founder Nawaz Sharif has the blessing of the generals. Adding to concerns about the integrity of the vote, authorities suspended mobile phone services just as polls opened and only began to restore them more than three hours after polls shut at 5:00 pm local time (1200 GMT).
The interior ministry said the outage was “to maintain law and order” after two blasts on Wednesday that killed 28 people. Nighat Dad, a lawyer who runs the not-for-profit Digital Rights Foundation, called the blackout “an attack on the democratic rights of Pakistanis”.
“Shutting down mobile phone services is not a solution to national security concerns. If you shut down access to information you create more chaos”. More than 650,000 army, paramilitary and police personnel were deployed to provide security on Thursday.
At least seven officers were killed in two separate attacks targeting election security details, and officials reported a string of minor blasts in southwestern Balochistan province that wounded two people.
