KABUL -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai won last month's presidential election outright in the first round election officials said on Wednesday, September 16, but his victory is not secure until claims of massive vote fraud are resolved. "Based on the preliminary results that we have announced today, Hamid Karzai is at the front of the queue," Daud Ali Najafi, an official with the Independent Election Commission (IEC), told reporters.
The IEC figures put Karzai on track to win a second term with 54.6 percent of the vote while his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, got 27.8 percent.
The total number of ballots cast was 5,918,741 from a total of 15,295,016 registered voters.
Turnout was 38.7 percent with threats of violence by Taliban apparently keeping people away from the polls.
Abdullah has shown no sign of conceding the vote, alleging state-engineered fraud and urging a run-off, raising fears of protests by his supporters.
"We do not accept these results at all," his campaign spokesman Sayed Aqa Fazel Sancharaki told Agence France Presse (AFP).
"We have announced time and again that as long as all suspicious and fraudulent votes are not addressed and the final findings of the ECC are not announced, any results from the IEC are not important."
Preliminary
Najafi, the IEC, asserted that it was “impossible” to announce the final results on Thursday as earlier scheduled.
"This is just the preliminary results, we will have final results when we investigate the (fraud) claims."
Karzai is already on a collision course with his international backers over the controversial vote.
“We have calculated 1.5 million suspicious votes," said Dimitra Ioannou, the deputy head of the European Union Election Observation Mission to Afghanistan.
She told reporters that 1.1 million of the suspicious votes were cast for Karzai and 300,000 for Abdullah.
"Massive fraud was taking place at polling station level and when all these ballot boxes arrived at the tally centers, instead of being quarantined and investigated, they were accepted as good results."
The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) has also ordered a recount at 2,500 polling stations, a process which will likely take weeks.
Most of the questionable ballots are in Karzai's strongholds and if the recount pushes the incumbent's lead below 50 percent, the IEC would have to hold a run-off between the two leading candidates.
Analysts and observers have warned that time is running out to organize a second round, with the onset of harsh winter in two months making the logistics difficult.
This could create a dangerous political vacuum in a nation where more than 100,000 US and NATO-led troops are stationed to battle a resurgent Taliban bent on toppling the West-installed government.
The political limbo is stoking fears of instability and concern among Western donors that a future government may lack a clear mandate.
Source: IslamOnline
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