ISLAMABAD _ A bitter election season in Pakistan concluded in more bloodshed Wednesday when a suicide bombing killed at least 31 people outside a polling station and voters nationwide cast ballots amid a heavy security presence.
Officials said that dozens were wounded in the bombing outside a school that served as a polling center in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, where some 150 people were killed in a blast at a campaign rally two weeks ago. Both attacks were claimed by Islamic State.
Among the dead in Wednesday's blast were at least four police officers, part of a deployment of 600,000 security personnel that illustrated the troubles facing Pakistan's democracy _ and was a sign of the army's outsize role in an election that seemed certain to produce more political upheaval.
As election workers began counting ballots in a race that would determine the next prime minister, the front-runners were Imran Khan, a former playboy cricket star who has rebranded as a pious nationalist, and Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of jailed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who claims to be the victim of a political witch hunt by the army.
Candidates were vying for 270 seats in the 342-member National Assembly.
The army _ which has ruled Pakistan directly or through proxy civilian governments for most of its 70 years as an independent nation _ was thought by many to have tilted the playing field in Khan's favor, perhaps setting the stage for an acrimonious post-election period.
Khan painted himself as an antidote to the corrupt rule of the Sharifs and Bhuttos, the two elite political families who have traded power in recent decades in between periods of military rule.
He has also lashed out at the U.S. for its bombing campaign in Pakistan's tribal belt and courted Islamic extremists by endorsing anti-blasphemy laws that are used to target Pakistan's non-Muslim religious minorities
First-time voter Muhammad Adnan, a 20-year-old student living in the capital, Islamabad, said he supported Khan's campaign for change.
"He is against the status quo. He is against thieves and looters. He has promised to make a new Pakistan and we trust him," Adnan said, surrounded at a polling station by friends who said they were also backing Khan.
"We have come here on our own free will and are voting for him," he said. "Nobody, including the army, forced us. You can see our smiling faces."
Khan denied allegations that he was the army's favored candidate _ despite widespread reports of meddling and intimidation by the security establishment that appeared aimed at crippling the Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif, the former three-time prime minister who won the last general election in 2013.
While in office, Sharif irked Pakistan's generals by trying to exert control over security affairs, including relations with rival India. The judiciary ousted Sharif and banned him from office last year over allegations that his family used undeclared wealth to purchase four expensive apartments in London, a case their supporters argue was politically motivated.
Weeks before the election, a court jailed Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz, widely seen as his electoral stand-in. The party leader became Sharif's brother Shahbaz, the leader of Punjab province, home to half of Pakistan's 200 million people.
Nawaz Sharif and his daughter returned to Pakistan from London to appeal their convictions and were arrested. They remain in jail, having become even more sympathetic figures to their supporters.
Fatima Bibi, an 85-year-old voter, said she traveled nearly 900 miles to vote for Sharif's party at her registered polling place in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, outside Islamabad.
"I have seen so many governments and rulers in this country in my lifetime," she said. "Only a few of them have made this country better and Nawaz Sharif is one of them. ... He is not a thief but a true Pakistani."
The Sharifs' supporters accused the security establishment of attempting to erode their party's vote base in Punjab by engineering the defections of several Pakistan Muslim League candidates, some of whom joined Khan's campaign, and by allowing candidates from banned Islamic extremist groups to run under newly formed political organizations.
Those developments, along with restrictions on privately owned news media, contributed to what the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called "blatant, aggressive and unabashed attempts to manipulate the outcome of the upcoming elections."
The army said it would deploy nearly 400,000 soldiers at polling places to provide security, more than five times as many as in 2013, although security nationwide has generally improved. An additional 200,000 police and other security personnel were also stationed inside and outside polling stations at the request of election authorities.
The heavy deployment "border(s) dangerously on micromanagement by an institution that should not be involved so closely in what is strictly a civilian mandate," the human rights commission said.
