Daily Times

While Fafen’s report points to a roughly half-million vote gap in Punjab and other vote discrepancies across provinces, there are multiple reasons to question both the severity and causes of these findings. First, the gap in Punjab is only around 1.3 percent of the nearly 37 million total votes cast, suggesting normal variation or invalid ballots could account for much of the difference, and the constituency dynamics. Second, Islamabad’s 0.59 million NA-only votes already skew any direct NA-PA comparison. Third, first-past-the-post systems naturally tend to produce seat distributions that appear disproportionate to the total number of votes received, so a higher seat share than vote share isn’t by itself proof of wrongdoing. Fourth, local factors, such as popular independent candidates or tribal affiliations, can further distort simple NA-PA comparisons, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Finally, unless Fafen provides transparent, constituency-level data to back up its broad assertions, claims of mismanagement remain speculative rather than definitive.