Afghan elections

A shadow continues to grow over the re-election of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Allegations of rigging began on Election Day and have continued to increase. Election authorities were initially supposed to release preliminary results on October 19, but claims of fraud and technical issues forced the IEC to delay the announcement repeatedly.Some 16,500 complaints have been lodged by four presidential candidates since the announcement of the results on December 22.

The number is so high that Afghanistan’s Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC) has bluntly said that it cannot respond to all of them by the due date — 15 days. Independent experts said it could take up to five weeks to investigate all the complaints.

A spokesperson for IECC has said that they would extend the response time as necessary and would not ignore any complaints. While this position has the support of other prominent candidates such as Abdullah Abdullah and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, President Ghani has vehemently opposed it. His opposition is curious unless of course, he knows that he did not win fair and square. What Ghani does know is that the election commission had to purge nearly one million of the initial 2.7 million votes polled, making this the lowest turnout of any election in the country of 37 million people, 9.6 million of whom are registered voters.

Ghani was reportedly the frontrunner with almost 51% of the 1.8 million votes counted. But Chief Executive Abdullah, who had over 39%, claims he actually had a significant majority and accused Ghani of stuffing over 300,000 ballots, or roughly one-third of his tallied votes. The irony is that in the wake of previous fraud-marred elections, the IEC for the first time used biometric machines to deter people from voting more than once. But many of those machines ended up being stolen. Among the complaints is that votes cast on stolen devices have been counted.

With the final results due after the complaints are reviewed, it must be acknowledged that a fair election might be the only thing that lends credibility to the Afghan government, especially given the recent revelations of the extent of US-backed rigging in previous elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2020.

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