As the nation has voted to elect its representatives on February 8, we are seeing some major upsets and major wins, with more still to come despite the passage of nearly 24 hours.

Despite the suspension of mobile phone and internet services, a large number of people across the country exercised their right to vote to elect their representatives for national and provincial assemblies — on 855 constituencies — in the world’s fifth-biggest democracy.

The 2024 elections surpassed the previous ones in 2018 in various aspects, including a record budget allocation of Rs48 billion, a substantial increase in the number of voters exceeding 50% of the total population, an unprecedented ratio of independent candidates, a total of nearly 18,000 candidates, and a substantial amount of paper required for printing 260 million ballots.

As people cast their votes, we saw prime minister hopefuls of two big parties — Nawaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari — emerge victorious. However, the results are still coming in and it isn’t clear when the complete results will be compiled.