Washington, October 16: A probe into fraud allegations in Afghanistan’s August elections has dropped President Hamid Karzai’s share of the vote to 47 percent, triggering a run-off, The Washington Post reported late Thursday.
One official told the Post the tally by the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, due to be completed Friday, was “stunning.”
Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission had given Karzai 54.6 percent of the August 20 vote in its preliminary results, which would position him for a second, five-year term.
The results gave Karzai’s main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, around 28 percent of the vote.
Ballots listing both candidates, printed in London in anticipation of a possible run-off, have already arrived at the UN mission in Kabul, a US official in Afghanistan told the newspaper.
The necessary indelible ink was also already on hand and polling station kits are expected to be readied for distribution this week, the daily said.
A run-off was planned if Karzai’s valid votes fall below 50 percent as a result of the investigations, although questions remain about how effective a new poll would be.
“The big challenge (for new elections) is security,” the US official told the Post.
Another official cautioned that “we’ve got to figure out a way to give legitimacy to whoever wins.” A second round, “if clean, and if done properly, basically washes away the sins of the first,” he added.
Karzai’s ambassador in Washington, Said Tayeb Jawad, said earlier that a second round of voting was a “likely scenario” but warned it would be “impossible” to hold the run-off within two weeks of the ballots being certified, as required by the Afghan constitution.
But Jawad said a new vote should be held within a month.
–Agencies