Afghan vote audit suspended again over disagreement

Afghan election commission workers, overseen by Nato-led Italian troops, unload ballot boxes flown in on a UN aircraft from Farah province and to be sent onward to Kabul, at Herat airport on July 24, Show more

KABUL // Afghanistan’s election commission on Saturday once again suspended the auditing of votes cast in the presidential run-off poll, after the two candidates failed to agree on the procedure for invalidating fraudulent votes.

“The Independent Election Commission has decided to suspend temporarily the vote audit until the fourth day of Eid, and we hope it is enough time for the candidates to sort out their differences,” said the IEC chairman, Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani.

“The votes audit goes very slowly, the representatives of the candidates have walked out of the auditing process for the third time in the past 10 days over differences of opinion,” he said.

The audit was briefly suspended a week ago by a dispute over vote-count records deemed void by one candidate’s team as they lacked a full name and signature.

Saturday’s suspension came shortly after the United Nations said that both candidates had indicated they support a UN proposal with specific criteria for invalidating fraudulent ballots.

The procedure for dealing with fraud is the primary point of contention between the two sides, but they also disagree on other technical aspects of the process.

US President Barack Obama called both candidates on Friday night, asking them to endorse their previous agreement over the outcome of the election audit and the formation of a national unity government.

The inspection of all 8.1 million ballots cast in the June 14 run-off was agreed by rival candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani following a deal brokered two weeks ago by the US secretary of state John Kerry.

The IEC had said it would take around three weeks, with teams working in two shifts processing around 1,000 ballot boxes a day.

But since the start of the process, in which hundreds of national and international observers have crammed into the IEC in Kabul to separate fraudulent ballots from clean ones, the audit has been lagging behind schedule with just 1,361 out of some 23,000 ballot boxes completed as of Friday.

This has raised concerns that the original timeframe for completing the process is unlikely to be kept, and that the audit could take until late August to finish.

That in turn would further push back the already delayed inauguration of the new Afghan president.

Mr Abdullah, who draws most of his support from Tajiks and other northern Afghan groups, led after the first round of voting, but preliminary results of the run-off announced on July 7 showed Mr Ghani, whose support base is mainly among the Pashtun tribes of the south and east, ahead by over one million votes.

Mr Abdullah rejected the result, saying that most of his opponent’s ballots were fraudulent.

The bitter impasse over the vote to succeed President Hamid Karzai, following Mr Abdullah’s claims of massive fraud, had raised fears of a return to the ethnic violence of the 1990s.

The election dispute also comes as Afghanistan is gripped by a Taliban-led insurgency ahead of the withdrawal of US-led Nato forces by the end of the year, with the militant group staging regular attacks on Afghan and foreign forces.

The militants have been testing the capacity of the Afghan forces, with a major assault in the southern province of Helmand last month which was pushed back after weeks of heavy fighting that left hundreds of Afghan civilians as well as security personnel dead or injured.

* Agence France-Presse