Sep 10 2009
News Today follow-up: Afghanistan election fraud
Earlier this week I wrote about the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission’s (ECC) allegations of fraud and misconduct in the Afghanistan election. Enough news has trickled in about the issue that I wanted to do a follow-up on the story.
Today the ECC threw out votes from 83 polling stations and ordered recounts at hundreds of others stations in three provinces, Kandahar, Ghazni and Paktika. All three of those provinces are dominated by voters who are ethnic Pashtuns and form the President Hamid Karzai’s political base.
The last official count had results in from 92 percent of the country’s polling stations, and gave Karzai has 54 percent of the vote. However if the ECC invalidates enough votes, Karzai’s margin could drop below 50 percent, which would force him to face his rival Abdullah Abdullah in a second runoff election.
Although the ECC would not say how many ballots were invalidated, the number is likely in the thousands. The commission threw out ballots from 51 polling stations in Kandahar province, 27 in Ghazni, five in Paktika and also ordered supervised recounts in hundreds of other voting centers across the three districts.
Abdullah claims the fraud is state-sponsored, and there may be some validity to his arguments.
“Of course there were fears and concerns about the possibility of fraud or rigging,” Abdullah told the AP. “But … when you investigate it, then you see that the whole thing was state-engineered and unfortunately in collaboration with the IEC (Independent Election Commission), in most cases.”
The IEC is a Karzai-appointed commission and some of the numbers they’ve tried to sneak by are almost offensive. At one polling center in the Kandahar city of Spin Boldak Karzai received exactly 3,000 votes, 600 from each of the five polling stations.
The Washington-based National Democratic Institute said it found large numbers of stations with more than 600 votes (the maximum number of ballots they were supposed to receive) in Nuristan, Paktia, Helmand and Badghis provinces, along with several others.
