How Awami League rigged Bangladesh’s 2024 election

A January 2026 policy brief by the TechGlobal Institute, “Hijacking the Vote: Inside Bangladesh’s Data-Driven Election Manipulation,” alleges large-scale statistical anomalies in the 2024 parliamentary polls. The report, led by Shahzeb Mahmood and Kalim Ahmed, says more than 1,000 polling centers reported exactly zero invalid ballots—an outcome the authors call statistically improbable in a manual, paper-based system. They argue the totals “balance because they were made to balance,” suggesting figures were engineered to appear clean.

The brief notes that in 150 constituencies analyzed, 1,006 centers recorded perfect ballots with no stray marks or spoils, defying the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network’s typical 3–5% human error rate. The authors suggest these tally sheets were likely filled centrally rather than from actual counts.

In contrast, some centers showed extreme rejection rates that coincided with near-unanimous valid votes for incumbents. At Noakhali-1’s Ulupara Govt Primary School (Centre 82), 29.06% of ballots—254 of 874—were rejected, while 98.23% of valid votes went to the incumbent. The report frames this as selective invalidation to suppress opposition support.

In Sherpur-1, the brief cites a “Russian tail” uniformity: 32 centers with simultaneous very high turnout and 99%+ dominance for one candidate, a pattern the authors link to ballot stuffing or administrative intervention.

Looking ahead to elections under the interim government of Muhammad Yunus, the brief warns that risks now lie in centralized digital infrastructure, including the KOPOT results dashboard. It says KOPOT showed an unexplained national turnout jump from 28% to 40% in the final two hours of election day in 2024. The institute urges 10 reforms, such as tighter control of the National Identity database and reconciling all digital results with scanned, signed polling-station forms.