By early afternoon on Election Day for the president of Afghanistan, officials began to fret. At many polling stations, including some in the capital, Kabul, only the occasional voter had shown up. To allow for a bigger turnout, voting was extended by two hours, The New York Times writes.
The worry about low turnout has now turned into suspicion of artificially high turnout. Ballot boxes from several areas that had exceptionally high turnout in the Saturday election, surprising observers, have arrived at the Independent Election Commission’s tabulation centers brimming with votes. Some places of sparse voting reported turnout rates as high as 90 percent.
Despite evidence that the election was conducted more cleanly compared with years past, Afghans who braved Taliban violence to cast ballots now fear a muddled outcome because of fraud, dragging their war-ravaged country into a new crisis.
The fear amounts to a test for the Election Commission, which will declare the winner. It has vowed to discard bogus ballots and expressed confidence in detecting them with a new biometric voter identification system. But there was quickly talk that the commission could loosen its strict rules, the Times noted.
“The commission has the technical ability to address the fraud, so there is no worry about it,” said Mohammad Yusuf Rashid, the chief executive of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan, a nongovernmental watchdog group. “But they should be honest in addressing the fraud.”
The campaigns of the two leading candidates, President Ashraf Ghani and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both claimed they were in the lead even as the ballot counting had barely begun. Final results are not expected for more than a week.
The Election Commission was revamped ahead of the vote, with new commissioners appointed to replace predecessors jailed on charges of fraud and misuse.
Several commissioners expressed confidence in the biometric verification technology, which recorded each voter’s fingerprints and photograph at every polling station. The commissioners said their server computers, where the biometric data is stored, automatically separate duplicate votes, the news outlet noted.
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