Kabul, September 08: Afghan election returns on Tuesday put incumbent Hamid Karzai on course for a first-round victory, but a U.N.-backed watchdog said it had “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” and ordered a partial recount.
The results put Karzai and the Afghan election authorities on a collision course with an international community increasingly skeptical of the outcome of a poll it paid for.
Officials said the partial recount of the August 20 poll could postpone a final result for weeks or months, keeping Afghanistan in a prolonged state of political uncertainty.
With votes from 91.6 percent of polling stations counted, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) reported Karzai ahead with 54.1 percent of the vote to 28.3 for main rival Abdullah Abdullah, who accuses Karzai’s team of large scale fraud.
It was the first time the commission had reported Karzai on course to exceed the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright and avoid a second round, radically altering the calculations of Western diplomats keen to ensure a credible outcome.
A separate Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), led by a Canadian and mainly appointed by the United Nations, went public with accusations of fraud for the first time.
“In the course of its investigations, the ECC has found clear and convincing evidence of fraud in a number of polling stations,” the body said in a statement.
It ordered the IEC to recount results from polling stations where one candidate received more than 95 percent of the vote or where more votes were cast than the expected maximum of 600.
The ECC must sign off on the result for it to be final.
The Afghan election commission, for its part, said it was already fighting fraud and had set aside results from more than 600 of the country’s 25,000 polling stations.
IEC Chief Electoral Officer Daoud Ali Najafi said it could take two to three months to comply with the ECC’s order. A second round, if needed, would be difficult to hold in Afghanistan beyond October because of extreme weather.
Some suspicious results posted earlier — including from a village where Karzai received every single vote cast and exactly 500 votes at each of four separate polling stations — were removed from the commission’s website without explanation.
—Agencies