THE CASE OF NA238 Karachi - Mandate Stolen Overnight
General Elections in Pakistan were held on 8th February, 2024, and while Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf backed independent candidates were winning with huge margins across the country, the election results were changed overnight in favor of other candidates. Karachi, which is Pakistan’s largest city, with a population of more than 17 million. Not only that, Karachi is the driver of Pakistan’s economy, with it being the country’s premier industrial and financial center with an estimated GDP of $164 billion. With this, Karachi contributes to 25% of Pakistan’s GDP and 35% of the country’s tax revenue. With all these contributions, the people of Karachi were robbed of their mandate on the night of general elections 2024.
PTI was winning 20 National Assembly seats in Karachi, all by HUGE margins. However, overnight these results were changed and MQM was gifted most of these seats. Below we have explored the case of NA-238, where PTI backed Independent Candidate Haleem Adil Sheikh mysteriously lost his won seat to MQM’s Sadiq Iftikhar. According to Form 45s, that were collected by each candidate’s polling agents at the end of polling, Haleem Adil Sheikh got 84488 votes, in Second Place was JI’s Saifuddin with 32907 votes and in third place was MQM’s Sadiq Iftikhar with 10296 votes. As Haleem Adil Sheikh’s team received these forms, they scanned and uploaded them on public forums at the night of election.
Pictures of these forms are uploaded on Twitter (X) and can be accessed by anyone; they have a time stamp and are proof that these were the original and un-doctored forms. The digital footprint is evidence of the fact that these were the original forms uploaded with public access on the night of the general election.