Did The U.S. "Hack" the Pakistan Election?

When the former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government was toppled in a parliamentary coup backed by the Pakistani military and the U.S. State Department in 2022, it was only in its fourth year.

Since then, the Pakistani military has ruled from the shadows, trying to delay the inevitable elections while at the same time trying to ensure that the massively popular Khan and his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, do not come back to power.

A growing body of evidence points to election manipulation and political interference by the Pakistani military.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights deplored these incidents in their statement on Tuesday. “We are disturbed by the pattern of harassment, arrests and prolonged detentions of leaders of the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party and their supporters which has continued during the election period,” the statement read.

Inside Pakistan, the media is completely muzzled.

Outside Pakistan, the upcoming elections are being called the “least credible in the country’s historyOpens in a new tab,” and “more like a coronationOpens in a new tab,” where the military is understood merely to be choosing a new civilian face for its rule.

Mobile phone and internet services have been suspended in Pakistan as millions of voters head to polling booths to cast their votes amid high security cover.

The charges against ousted prime minister Khan range from incoherent to absurd. He was charged with “exposing state secrets” for publicly discussing…   the contents of the secret cable. He was slapped with a seven-year sentence for what the Supreme Court said was an invalid marriage. And he got 14 years for supposedly keeping state gifts without filing the proper paperwork or compensating the state, though all evidence suggests that he did so.

Key software used in managing elections was behaving oddly.

There are reports of PTI candidates being abducted by unknown men and returning home only after announcing their withdrawal from the race.

There are polling stations that used to have a few thousand voters assigned to them but will now have tens of thousands of voters. One polling station in Lahore that used to have only 8,000 constituents has ballooned to 29,000Opens in a new tab, including thousands of young and first-time voters from all over Lahore.