Margins of victory vs. rejected votes, who benefited?

This analysis is based on the final results of the 270 National Assembly constituencies that took part in the 2018 General Elections.

Some important definitions:

1. Turnout: Turnout is the percentage of total polled votes out of total registered votes, higher is good, lower is bad
2. Rejection: Rejection is the percentage of total rejected votes out of total polled votes, lower is good, higher is bad
3. Poll %: Percentage of votes received to party or candidate out of total polled votes
4. Seat %: Percentage of NA seats won out of total seats
5. Margin: The difference between votes received by the 1st and 2nd candidates in a constituency. Margin is calculated at constituency level and then aggregated to arrive at party level, province level, city level and national level margin numbers
6. Margin %: Margin as a percentage of candidate votes or (in the case of national level, province level and city level view, margin as a percentage of polled votes

Winning Margins vs Rejections by Province

Based on updated data, we see that the national average for turnout was 51.7% and 3.1% of all polled votes nationally were rejected. Furthermore, the national average of margin of victory was 12%. We can see that only Sindh and KPK had victory margins greater than the national average.

All constituencies where winning margins were less than rejected votes

All constituencies where PMLN won against PTI and margins were less than rejected votes

All constituencies where PTI won against PMLN and margins were less than rejected votes

From the tables about we can see there are exactly 9 constituencies where both PTI and PMLN won their respective seats and winning margins were lower than rejected votes – this conclusively proves that both PTI and PMLN equally benefited from low margins in comparison to rejected votes.

Winning Margins vs Rejections by Party

PTI candidates received 9.9m votes in those constituencies in which PTI emerged victorious whereas PMLN candidates received 6.9m votes in those constituencies in which PMLN emerged victorious. PTI’s winning constituencies had an average turnout of 50.2% which is lower than that for PMLN’s (55.7%) and PPP’s (52.4%) winning constituencies. This indicates that the road to victory was slightly tougher for PTI as it had to face marginally lower turnouts in constituencies from which they won. Margins of victory for PTI and PMLN are extremely close with PTI at 26.7% and PMLN at 26.1%. This debunks any myths of rigging which would have showed abnormally high margin numbers for PTI. PPP, however, enjoyed victory margins of 35.9% in its victorious areas. PPP’s constituencies also exhibit a very high rejection rate at 4.5%.

Winning Parties vs Runners up – Who Won More?

We see that PMLN defeated PTI in 57 constituencies with a winning margin of 26.1% whereas PTI defeated PMLN in 50 constituencies with a winning margin of 22.9% (i.e. lower than PMLN’s). Looking at this statistic in conjunction with poll % for both parties (45.2% for PTI, 45% for PMLN) we can conclude that although both parties enjoyed equal popular support in areas where they went head on, PMLN was the one with the higher victory margins, thereby debunking the vote rigging myth because had there been any rigging by PTI, the margin percentages would have been consistently higher for PTI.

Hence from all the data above we can clearly see that PTI did not benefit exclusively from low winning margins or high rejections rates.