Would 2013 have been different if...?

The Election Commission of Pakistan did a thorough job of mixing things up with the delimitation exercise of 2018. Here are some summary statistics and key takeaways to get your head around things:

• Almost all constituencies have new numbers (NA-001 for 2013 is no longer NA-001 and so forth)

• The total number of seats remains static at 272

• This means that there was a re-shuffling within the 272 seats to achieve the new delimitation.

• KPK gained 4 seats to get 39 seats - Swat, Lower Dir, Tank and Peshawar got a new seat each.

• Tribal areas have the same number of seats as 2013: 12

• Islamabad gained a seat and now has 3 seats

• Punjab lost 7 seats to go down to 141 seats

• Sindh had the same number of seats: 61

• Balochistan gained 2 seats to get to 16 seats

• Delimitation re-drew boundaries within each province and its impacts will unfold at the constituency level

There is some last minute wrangling in the courts that might change the delimitation outcomes for a few constituencies but one question that we wanted to answer with a best estimate was:

How different would have the 2013 election results been if the latest delimited constituencies been used at that time?

Answer: PML(N) and Punjab would have been the biggest losers as out of the 13 seats that we have assessed as eliminating a seat, 10 were won by PML(N), 1 by PPP and 2 by independent candidates.

In terms of new seats - the gains were as follows:

4 for PML(N) - gains with new seats elsewhere in Punjab

3 for PTI in KPK

1 seat for PPP

1 for JUI-F

1 seat for MQM in Karachi

1 seat for Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party

1 seat for the National Party

1 for Jamaat-e-Islami

PML-N won 126 seats in the first go in 2013, versus 34 by PPP and 28 by PTI - so the limited impact of delimitation wouldn’t have mattered much.

That said, there might be impact of the re-drawing of constituency boundaries which is not yet clear yet. This action would potentially hurt incumbents the most as they would be contesting elections in areas they didn’t cover in the past, potentially governed by a different party.

If you're interested in digging deeper, we've put together a detailed table that "generally" map each of the 2013 NA constituency to the newly delimited 2018 constituencies. Again, the election commission has changed the NA seat number considerably causing much confusion. So hopefully this table helps readers map old seat numbers from 2013 to the new seat numbers relevant to the upcoming 2018 elections.