Caroline Davies
Reporting from Lahore

The results are coming through steadily for Imran Khan's party despite the restrictions against it. The PTI had always said it wasn't going to give up on winning despite its founder being jailed and barred from running for office.

Some of its candidates also kept campaigning despite being in prison; if they weren't yet convicted they were free to stand for election from behind bars.

Others avoided the police altogether and ran their campaigns from hiding.

Atif Khan was a provincial minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north of Pakistan. As part of his campaign, he appeared on video broadcasts on three-metre screens his team drove around his patch, parking up in town squares to address PTI supporters.

This was the only way he could take his message to voters, he said, because he had been in hiding since May. The authorities say he is a wanted man. He believes he wouldn't get a fair trial.

"It's a totally different experience, not amongst the crowds, not on stage, not amongst people, but we are trying to manage it," Mr Khan told the BBC before the election.

"The biggest support base of PTI is the young voter. They are using digital media, mobile phones, that's why we thought we should be more engaged with them through it. That is the only thing we can do, we can campaign through digital media."

Read more: Imran Khan: How Pakistan ex-PM plans to win an election from jail

Image source, EPA

We've just seen the first seat announced in Balochistan - a restive region which has seen significant political violence in the lead-up to the election.

The day before Thursday's vote, at least 30 people were killed and scores more injured in two explosions outside candidate and election offices in the province.

The poor province in Pakistan's south-west only has 16 seats in the National Assembly. The chief of the Balochistan National Party (BNP), Sardar Akhtar Jan Mengal, has just secured its first one.

Many voters in Balochistan feel neglected by the country's political parties, given the province - the poorest and largest in Pakistan- has so few seats in parliament. They often feel candidates are foisted on them, with few if any links to Balochistan.

And many feel the vote is unfair. "It is a selection," numerous people told BBC Urdu in the city of Turbat last month.

It's mid-afternoon in Pakistan and while we had a 24 hour-long delay in the results, they are coming through steadily now.

More than 122 seats of 265 National Assembly seats have been announced.

And independents, many affiliated with Imran Khan's PTI party, are well in the lead.

At 15:00 local time, the Electoral Commission site showed they had picked up 49 seats. That's 10 ahead of Nawaz Sharif's PML-N on 39 seats.

It is not immediately obvious where the independents affiliations lie.

The PPP - the Bhutto-Zardari party - is at 30 seats.

Pakistan broadcaster Geo News has described the race as independents "dominating polls".

Image source, Alex Wong/Getty Images

Pakistan's former ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi, has said that Pakistan's voter numbers show a "belief in the democratic process".

Lodhi added that the results declared so far challenge the narrative that the elections were a "foregone conclusion".

Lodhi went on to say that Pakistan "desperately" needs political stability to address what she described as "the worst economic crisis in its history".

The former ambassador added that she believes that whoever wins these elections faces "a really daunting agenda".

Lodhi was Pakistan's ambassador to the US under two different administrations. The first being from 1993–1996 and then again throughout 1999–2002, making her Pakistan's longest ever serving ambassador to the US.

Image source, EPA

Pakistan People's Party leader and prime ministerial candidate, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has won his seat says the Electoral Commission.

The heir to the Bhutto-Zardari political dynasty ran in the National Assembly race for the seat of Qamber Shahdadtkot-I.

He is the son of former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in 2007 and former President Asiz Ali Zardari. He is also the grandson of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former PM and president, and in the last term of government served as Pakistan's foreign minister.

At just 35 years of age, he is leading his family's party but was considered an outside chance to become Prime Minister.

With the way results are shaping up though, anything could happen now.

Overnight he tweeted, external: "Results are incredibly slow coming in. However, initial results are very encouraging!

"PPP candidates and independents whom we have supported/ engaged with seem to be doing well! Let’s see what the final tally is in the end…"

Samira Hussain
Reporting from Islamabad

Shoaib Shaheen is a PTI supported independent candidate from Islamabad.

Speaking to us outside the office where ballots were being counted, Shaheen says he believes unequivocally there has been election rigging- although he provided no evidence.

He said that unofficial early results showed he was in the lead by 50,000 votes but he believes the results in his constituency were changed to favour his opponent, a member of the PMLN.

Shaheen says he has already complained to the Electoral Commission and plans to take his case to the High Court. We’ve spoken to the Electoral Commission which denies any allegations of vote rigging.

Image source, Shoaib Shaheen

A group of 25-30 PTI supporters have been arrested for staging a rally for party candidate Shoaib Shaheen in the capital, according to the Dawn newspaper.

Police said the group had been chanting slogans in breach of the order banning PTI rallies and gatherings.

Police claim that around half the group were armed, and some resisted when asked to move on from the spot.

Image source, EPA

Nawaz Sharif has lost the battle for a National Assembly seat in the constituency of Mansehra, according to unofficial results released by the local district election office.

He finished second behind independent candidate Shahzada Gastasap by a margin of around 11,000 votes.

Earlier, Sharif triumphed in the constituency of Lahore against a PTI-backed candidate.

A candidate is allowed to contest both National Assembly seats and provincial assembly seats at the same time. They can contest any number of seats in any constituency.

If they win two seats, they are allowed to choose one seat, while the other will be contested again in a by-election.

Caroline Davies
Reporting from Lahore

Technology has been crucial for the PTI's campaign given so much of its traditional ways of reaching followers- massive rallies, public campaigning and its cricket bat symbol- were banned.

The party's official X, Instagram and TikTok pages each have several million followers, more than the other two main parties - the PPP and PML-N - combined.

Imran Khan is the only leader of the three parties to have a personal account on each of those three platforms too, which means their message is going direct into people's hands.

There have also been efforts to use tech to try to help voters know which candidate is PTI-backed. Without the uniting image of the cricket bat, the PTI have developed a website where voters can put in their constituency and discover their PTI-backed candidate's symbol.

With Khan locked up in jail unable to lead rallies, they've also turned to AI, in December generating a Khan speech for an online rally.

Read more here on how Imran Khan has been fighting to win the election from jail.

PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz, daughter of former prime minister Nawz Sharif, has won a National Assembly seat in Lahore.

She got almost 84,000 votes, according to provisional results announced by the electoral commission.

PTI-backed Shehzad Farooq finished second with some 68,000 votes.

Image source, Gety Images

As expected, Shehbaz Sharif has won his seat in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's most populous province, Punjab.

Shehbaz Sharif was the man who took over as prime minister in the coalition formed after Imran Khan was ousted as prime minister in a parliamentary vote in April 2022.

He led Pakistan until last August, when control was handed to a caretaker prime minister.

And as the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, he became the leader of the PML-N party- that is until Nawaz returned from exile last December to pick up his role as the PML-N's main leading candidate.

Samira Hussain
Reporting from Islamabad

I'm with about 20 people in an office where an electoral map is lighting up massive screens around the room.

This is what's referred to as the main control room that fields electoral complaints and is able to receive complaints via email, phone and WhatsApp.

The room is four floors above the Electoral Commission office where official results are being tallied and released.

On voting day yesterday, there were a total of 76 complaints although there was a recognition that had communications not been shut down that number would have been much higher.

When pressed on the issue of connectivity making the job more difficult, the officers were quick to toe the government line. They said that Pakistan was a young democracy and mobile services had to be shut down out of security concerns.

Image source, EPA

The new chairman of Imran Khan's PTI party has won his seat in the National Assembly.

Gohar Ali Khan won his constituency in Buner, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, with triple the votes of the next-ranked contender, the vote count form shows.

Khan was elected party chairman just in December, after being nominated by Imran Khan from jail.

Another party senior Asad Qaiser, a former speaker of parliament, has also won his seat in Swabi, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Several PTI-backed candidates have also won their seats.

They were forced to contest as independent candidates after the election commission ruled that the party could no longer compete under its iconic cricket bat symbol.

Image source, Reuters

To those who are just joining us, welcome to the BBC's live coverage of the Pakistan election results - which are looking like they may not be the foregone conclusion analysts initially expected.

Officially, Nawaz Sharif's PML-N party currently has the lead, with 17 out of the 51 seats officially announced by Pakistan's electoral commission. Analysts had tipped him as the winner as it appeared he had received the backing of Pakistan's powerful military.

But just behind that, on 14 seats, are independents backed by Imran Khan's PTI party.

This is despite the numerous hurdles in the party's way - including the fact their leader (and Pakistan's last elected prime minister) is behind bars and many of their candidates were pushed underground. You can read more about that in our Pakistan correspondent's story from the weekend here.

But back to today: there are questions surrounding why the results are trickling in at such a slow pace.

There are suspicions that it may be because the result has not gone the way the military wanted, according to Paris-based freelance journalist Taha Siddiqui.

But the electoral commission's spokesperson Nighat Siddiq has assured the BBC that “results will come pouring in soon”, saying they simply had "to ensure that we leave no space for error".

We are still waiting for that flood of results. With just a quarter of seats officially declared, nothing is certain yet.

BBC Urdu
in Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Supporters of a candidate backed by Imran Khan's PTI party in Pakistan's Kyhber Pakhtunkhwa province took to the streets, demanding the release of election results in the Bannu district.

They say that their candidate has won but the returning officer in the district was not releasing the votinfg records.

Members of Imran Khan's PTI have been forced to compete as independent candidates after Khan and hundreds of supporters and party members were jailed, and their party symbol taken away.

128m people have registered to vote in the elections, making up nearly half of its population.

About 44% of the registered voters are under the age of 35 - making the youth vote one to watch in this year’s poll.

The voter turnout is expected to be lower though. The last elections in 2018 saw a voter turnout of 52%.

About 69m or 53% of the voters are men. Although voting is a constitutional right in the country, many women in the country’s rural areas are not allowed to cast their ballots under tribal norms.

Close to six in 10 of the registered voters are residents in Punjab, which Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N has strategically focussed on.

Image source, Getty Images

Supporters of Imran Khan can be broadly divided into two groups, according to Burzine Waghmar of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

First, there are the “wired, urban, white-collared, Gen Z” to whom Khan is a national sporting legend.

Second, there are the “pious Pakistanis” of the lower middle and working classes, who are drawn to his anti-American rhetoric, as well as his denunciations of the West’s “war on terror”.

These supporters are “enraged” at the military and Khan’s political foes for “stage-managing” his dismissal and incarceration, Waghmar says.

“They are vehement that the establishment elites emasculated him because he was a conviction politician, no smooth operator, who merely echoed the common man's sentiments.”

Pakistan media reports that the Election Commission has announced the provisional results of 63 seats in the National Assembly.

We're still waiting for over 200 more but that's about 24% of the race counted.

The independents, many of them affiliated with PTI, are leading so far with a few more seats than the other contenders the PML-N (led by Nawaz Sharif) and the PPP (led by Bilawal Bhutto).

While it is not unusual to not have the full results the day after the election, the level of uncertainty over the outcome of this Pakistan general election is "unprecedented", says one analyst.

Tamanna Salikuddin of the US Institute of Peace told the BBC's Newsday that many election watchers had thought the result was a "done deal", with a clear path to victory for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N party.

"To have so few official results out and the ECP is not continuing to release data. I think that is unusual. It is a big surprise to people I think, who are watching these elections."

And while many had hoped the election would restore "some sort of stability" to the country, Salikuddin added: "Unfortunately, the results that have come in so far, don't portend any sort of political stability."

Image source, Reuters

Even though Imran Khan is barred from running for office, the former prime minister continues to be a powerful force in the election - independent candidates backed by his PTI party are currently leading in 47 out of 101 parliamentary seats where counting is underway, according to projections.

For some, Mr Khan is an anti-establishment hero. To his opponents, he is power-hungry and corrupt.

He was kicked out of office by opponents in parliament in 2022, barely four years after being elected. The former cricket star now faces more than 170 legal cases, including charges for corruption and terrorism. He claims they are a politically motivated attempt to keep him off the ballot.

But he still commands considerable support - tens of thousands took to the streets in cities across Pakistan on the night he was ejected from power.

Read more here.