Balloting Leaves Pakistanis Puzzled : Voting: Bhutto’s defeat has many wondering whether it was a perfect election or a perfect crime.

A day after Benazir Bhutto suffered a landslide defeat, Pakistanis are still unsure if they’ve witnessed the perfect election or the perfect crime.

The problem is that no one can explain how so few voters, with so little fuss, produced so many lopsided margins that Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party was routed throughout the country, shrinking from 94 seats in Parliament to 46.

Election officials reported light turnout and few challenges. And diplomats, reporters and official observers who visited hundreds of polling booths returned with little evidence of widespread fraud.

“Everywhere we went, we saw low turnout and low enthusiasm,” said an observer in the eastern city of Lahore. “But now we’re told the vote was far higher than in 1988. That strikes me as very odd.”

A Western diplomat in Islamabad agreed. “Everyone is bewildered and scratching their heads,” he said. “Did everyone miss something happening? Or did we all totally misread the electorate’s mood?”

Answers may come today when the 40-member delegation of the National Democratic Institute reports on its field visits and ballot counting. Its assessment will be watched closely in Washington, where Bhutto has strong support in Congress.

Election returns showed that the right-wing Islamic Democratic Alliance took 105 of the 217 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. With independents joining in, the anti-Bhutto coalition has an outright majority and can form a new government.

Bhutto, who was ousted on Aug. 6 after 20 months as prime minister, insisted that the election had been stolen by her political rivals. She predicted political and economic disaster. Pakistan, she told reporters, “is making a U-turn backward.”

Bhutto, who refuses to concede the election, also said she will challenge the election results in court rather than call street demonstrations.

“The People’s Party candidates who lost because of rigged elections will challenge the results in court,” Bhutto, 37, said after returning to her hometown of Karachi on Thursday night.

Dr. Sheik Tahseen, a spokesman for Bhutto’s party here, insisted that “massive rigging” took place at every polling place after international observers left.

“They stole the ballot boxes,” he said. “They kicked and kidnaped the poll workers. They filled the boxes with bogus votes. They made a fire to burn the ballots.”

Even before the voting began, Bhutto’s loyalists complained of cheating. They said the tactics included moving polling stations, impounding vehicles used to take supporters to vote and buying voter identity cards from the poor, the people who make up her support base.

Bhutto loyalists cried foul, particularly in the rural Sind race of Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, the caretaker prime minister. In 1988, the powerful, cigar-chomping landlord lost the election by 15,000 votes; this time, running against the same candidate, he won by 67,000 votes.

Jatoi’s son, Ghulam Murtaza Jatoi, similarly overwhelmed Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, in the neighboring district. Three Zardari supporters were shot to death, and poll workers said that Jatoi’s workers had faked votes and stuffed ballot boxes.

Meeting reporters Thursday in Islamabad, Jatoi insisted that he and his son had won fair and square. Indeed, he said, the sheer magnitude of the opposition victory showed there was no cheating.

“Who could have rigged that number of seats?” he asked. “It’s humanly impossible.”

Jatoi urged Bhutto to accept the “decision of democracy.” He said the government can’t “depend on the whims and fancies of a young lady. . . .”

“Benazir Bhutto’s fault has always been that she believes that she is always right and can do no wrong,” Jatoi said. “This is just like Alice in Wonderland.”

Husain Haqqani, a close aide, called Bhutto’s charges “the tears of a sore loser . . . who has been on the covers of news magazines too long to accept going to the back pages.”

Haqqani attributed the coalition’s victory partially to attempts to blame Bhutto for the suspension of U.S. economic and military aid earlier this month. The aid was frozen because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

“They played the America card very well,” he said. “She was seen as running to Uncle Sam. That offended Pakistanis’ sense of nationalism and sovereignty.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States is reserving judgment on Bhutto’s charges of election fraud until it hears the results of the international team of observers.

He added, however, that the Bush Administration “looked forward to working with any government that’s elected in a free and fair election.”

Analysts said the new government is likely to be more conservative on women’s issues, to step up denationalization of state industries and give greater emphasis to Islamic law.

In addition, alliance leaders have said the new government will continue the caretaker government’s investigation of corruption by Bhutto’s government. Bhutto has been charged with seven counts of abuse of power, and her husband was jailed on Oct. 10 on charges of kidnaping and extortion. She says the charges are baseless.