The 2024 Pakistani election will be significantly bigger than the previous one in every way, including a record Rs48 billion budget allocated for this massive exercise, a high voter turnout of over 50% of the population, an unprecedented number of independent candidates, and the amount of paper needed to print 260 million papers.
In addition, the polls on February 8 will cost 26 times as much as those in 2008, making them the most costly in the history of the nation. There were 11,700 candidates running in the last elections; this is a 53.8% rise to almost 18,000 contestants.
This time around, there are a lot of independent contenders because the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was forced to run as an independent after losing its famous “bat” electoral symbol.
As a result, the number of independent candidates in the race has increased by 95% to 11,785 from 6,037 in 2018.
After a significant growth of 22.5 million voters, including 12.5 million women, since 2018, Pakistan now has the fifth-highest number of registered voters in the world, behind only India, Indonesia, the US, and Brazil in the electoral rolls for the 2024 elections.
With this extraordinary increase, there will be 128,585,760 registered voters worldwide in 2024—a substantial increase from 105,955,409 in 2018 and 86,189,828 in 2013.
