Karzai keeps lead in Afghan election

Vote count almost complete:

AFGHANISTAN: President Hamid Karzai Saturday maintained his lead in Afghanistan’s elections with nearly all the votes counted, but vote-rigging complaints mean it could be weeks before final results are known.

With ballots from 95 percent of polling stations from the August 20 polls counted, preliminary results released by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) showed Karzai had a firm hold on his lead with 54.3 percent.

His nearest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, is lagging behind in the count so far with 28.1 percent, and has alleged massive state-engineered fraud in favour of a second five-year term for Western-backed Karzai.

But the winner will not be officially declared until all electoral fraud allegations are resolved, a process that could drag on creating a dangerous political vacuum in a nation battling a violent Taliban insurgency.

The final result was scheduled for September 17, but with the IEC saying that hundreds of thousands of ballots are now quarantined for audit, naming Afghanistan’s new president still looks weeks away. IEC spokesman Daud Ali Najafi said that 2.15 percent of the vote counted so far had been excluded from the latest results on the orders of the ECC, with votes from a total of 600 polling stations affected.

“A list has been sent to the ECC (Electoral Complaints Commission) for further investigations,” he told a press conference in Kabul.

The UN-backed ECC has already ordered thousands of votes thrown out from 83 polling stations and recounts in three provinces because of “clear and convincing evidence of fraud”.

Concerns raised by the ECC include suspiciously high turnout in provinces where Taliban intimidation kept people away from the polls, and high numbers of votes for one candidate at certain stations — indications of ballot stuffing.

Kabul, Sunday, AFP