Fallacious fairness
According to a report by Dawn… FAIRNESS is a prerequisite for any legitimate election. It is a categorical requirement of the Constitution under Article 218(3) which makes the Election Commission duty-bound to conduct elections “honestly, justly and fairly and in accordance with the law…”.
“Fairness” also requires that people’s votes are translated into political power in a way that reflects their actual strength in society. Fairness would imply that if a party wins 10 per cent of the national vote, it should get assembly seats of almost equivalent percentage.
A fair system would not deprive a party securing the fourth largest number of votes (TLP) in general elections 2024 (GE-2024) from bagging a single seat in the National Assembly (NA). On the contrary, parties ranked sixth (JUI-P) and ninth (MQM) in their total votes tally hold 2.4 per cent and 6.2pc of NA seats, respectively. The TLP bagged 5pc of the total polled votes as compared to 6pc and 2pc by MQM and JUI-P, respectively. The PML-N received 24pc of polled votes and won 30pc of seats as compared to PTI with 30pc of polled votes and 33pc of seats.
In KP, the PTI bagged 38pc of votes for the provincial assembly seats but won 75pc of seats as compared to 16pc votes received by JUI-P which got only 6.1pc seats. Interestingly, the ‘victimised’ PTI appeared to be the net beneficiary in the vote-to-seat ratio in GE-2024. This statistic defies common sense but the paradox makes perfect constitutional sense.
Pakistan under its current electoral system continues to follow the outdated first past the post (FPTP) method that rewards only the candidate with the most votes in a constituency, regardless of whether they represent a majority. All other votes, no matter how numerous, are effectively discarded and not translated into any representation.
For example, the PTI lost the NA-106 Toba Tek Singh-II seat by a mere 674 votes to PML-N. All votes against the PML-N went to waste and never translated into any representation. At the national level, 54pc of votes cast in GE-2024 did not translate into any representation — 52pc in 2002, 48pc in 2008, 56pc in 2018 and 54pc in 2024. Simply put, votes of 32.21 million in GE-2024 did not translate into any representation. Such a waste of public effort and political passion.
It is time for parliament to rethink the democratic trajectory.
In Pakistan’s case, where hundreds of political parties contest an election, FPTP has consistently shaped weak governments with minority public support. Weaker governments are also a recipe for political instability, hanging by a thin rope that can easily be clipped when they act independently or challenge the status quo.
A look at GE-2024 results suggests that 196 or 73pc of NA winners do not enjoy the support of a majority of voters in their constituencies, ie, they took less than 50pc of the polled votes. Similarly, 483 or 81pc of all provincial assembly winners got less than 50pc of the polled votes. The elected Houses, therefore, have a large majority of members who represent a minority vote in their respective constituencies.
A single constituency is a microcosm of national politics and power dynamics. Governments born out of this obsolete electoral system do not essentially represent even a simple majority of people who vote in an election, let alone the registered voters or population. They may attain a simple majority in terms of seats their candidates win and form a government but are far from reaching the magic 51pc of the polled votes mark. The only exception is the PPP which bagged 56pc of the polled votes in 1977 but was not allowed to form the government after the military takeover.
In 1997, the PML-N came close to the 51pc mark and secured 46pc of the polled votes. However, the two-thirds majority government, which repealed the infamous Article 58(2)(b) as soon as it took power, was ousted through military intervention two and a half years later because it had asserted, rightly or wrongly, the civilian supremacy.
The current coalition government has the collective support of a little over 40pc of people who voted in GE-2024 — the PML-N 24pc, PPP 14pc and MQM 2pc. Similarly, the PTI government had the support of only 32pc of people who cast their votes in 2018. In 2024, the party enjoyed the support of only 38pc of people who cast their votes for NA seats, suggesting that 62pc had voted against it.
Such electoral outcomes do not sound fair from any standard, but the FPTP obsession of our power elite does not seem to wane — a method that is exclusionary leaving no political space for smaller parties, marginalised groups, and regional perspectives, something that proportional representation (PR) systems are better at accommodating.
Keeping the unfairness in mind, it is probably the right time for the FPTP system to be discarded and replaced with a more representative variant of the PR system that suits Pakistan’s social and political contexts. One plausible option can be an open-list PR system, which allows voters to choose individual candidates from within the party list provided in an order of ranking in a multi-member electoral district. The total votes for the party still determine how many seats the party gets in assemblies, but party candidates with the most individual preference votes are the ones who get those seats, irrespective of their list ranking.
Such a system is practised in Brazil, Finland, Indonesia and some European parliaments. This system also takes away the opaqueness of the closed-list PR system, where parties pre-decide the order of candidates, and voters pick only the party such as in South Africa, Spain, etc.
Political parties must weigh in a fair, representative electoral system, which has the ability to yield strong governments. It is time for parliament to rethink the democratic trajectory. Any system that can ensure vote-to-seat proportionality, gives equal weight to every vote by translating all votes into representation and include diverse voices and voters can take the country out of its persistent democratic disorder. For Pakistan, such a reform is no longer just a matter of electoral engineering — it is a democratic imperative.
The writer is based in Islamabad and works with the Free and Fair Election Network.
Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2025 complete report is on below link. Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1947371/fallacious-fairness