Between the Ballot Box and the Screen: Digital Misinformation, Voter Trust, and Electoral Credibility in Pakistan's 2024 General Elections

Abstract

The 2024 General Elections in Pakistan occurred on a ground of a historic mobilization on the digital front, but also a series of having misinformation that essentially questioned the legitimacy of the election process. The paper discusses the interplay between the exposure to digital misinformation, voter confidence in the electoral institutions, and the perceived electoral credibility that are based on the primary survey data of 384 members of the general population as well as 384 presiding officers collected in major provinces of Pakistan. The study identifies, using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation and thematic analysis that 70.6% of electorate thought that political parties strategically misinformed electorate opinion by intentionally using digital misinformation, and 54.7% had the view that electorates had been directly harmed by electoral credibility damages through the use of digital misinformation. The respondents were all too enthusiastic about the issue of whether the Election Commission of Pakistan had organized free and fair elections, and that is the reason why only 37.2% have responded with an affirmation of the fact, which is in a stark contrast with the generally optimistic evaluations provided by the international observer missions. Controversially questioning this credibility gap, the paper states that it cannot be remedied through elections administration, but is mediated significantly by the ecosystem of misinformation, acting within WhatsApp, Tik Tok, Facebook and X contexts. In the context of comparative work in India, Nigeria and Brazil, the results imply that institutional transparency interventions are less and less effective when they are not backed by strong digital literacy infrastructure and content accountability mechanisms Theoretical contributions will be based on the agenda-setting theory, the Stimulus-Organism-Response model, and the literature on institutional trust in forming an integrative framework to understand the issue of digitally mediated electoral delegitimization.

Keywords: Digital Misinformation, Electoral Credibility, Voter Trust, Pakistan 2024 Elections, Election Commission of Pakistan, Social Media Influence, Democratic Legitimacy