Fraud could delay Afghan vote result. the Guardian
Officials must investigate thousands of fraud complaints as violence and low turnout mar Afghan parliamentary election
Widespread fraud committed during Afghanistan's parliamentary elections yesterday could ensure that the final result will not be known for months as officials are forced to wade through thousands of complaints, foreign election observers warned.
Despite the international community's hopes that a strengthened Afghan election commission would run a cleaner vote, reports proliferated today of a repeat of many of the abuses that wrecked last year's disastrous presidential poll.
The Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (Fefa), by far the country's biggest electoral monitoring group, said its observers had seen ballot stuffing, proxy and underage voting in most provinces.
Overall FEFA has "serious concerns about the quality of the election", the organisation said after polls closed.
Some reports suggested that ballot box stuffing continued into today, long after polling finished at 4pm yesterday.
The day was also marred by attacks against polling stations by insurgents who had vowed to disrupt the election. The interior ministry said at least 11 people were killed, including three police officers, in attacks around the country.
The violence helped to keep people from the polls. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) said 3.6m ballots were cast which, even before any are thrown out for being fraudulent, was the lowest number in any of the four national elections held in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Despite the violence and low turnout, Afghanistan's international backers rushed to congratulate the country for holding an election at all. David Petraeus, the US commander of Nato forces in the country, said it showed that "the voice of Afghanistan's future does not belong to the violent extremists and terror networks, it belongs to the people".
However, reports of widespread fraud threaten to undermine the election, the success of which is seen as important for maintaining international support for the nine-year-long conflict in Afghanistan.
Diplomats are also fearful of messy outcomes sparking additional conflict around the country.
"There is a real threat to the legitimacy of these elections," one western observer said. "But if the authorities just look for technicalities to dismiss complaints then you have the real risk that various races around the country could turn into violent clashes between different candidates or warlords or ethnicities."
In Helmand one candidate – who asked not to be identified – reported widespread abuse by his opponents, including votes being bought for about $10 each and voters being told to wash off what election officials had thought was indelible ink to go and vote a second and third time.
A spokesman for Helmand provincial governor Gulab Mangul said police had found two stuffed boxes abandoned in cornfields in Nowa district, while one man was arrested with a list of 12,000 voter registration card numbers with which he intended to record thousands of illegal votes. There were also various arrests of people holding stashes of counterfeit voting cards.
Countrywide the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) said it had received 126 written complaints and 1,300 from people who phoned or visited the commission's offices.
Martine van Bijlert, from the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said a delay in the final outcome would in large part depend on how many of those oral complaints were turned into written objections which the ECC would then be obliged to investigate.
According to the current timetable the final certified results are due to be published at the end of October after a laborious process of tallying results from across the country and investigating complaints.
AfghanistanJon Booneguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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istan-election-fraud-delay-result