Karzai gets absolute majority in Afghan poll

KABUL - President Hamid Karzai won an absolute majority in Afghanistan’s presidential election, according to a final preliminary result released by the election commission Wednesday.

Incumbent Karzai won 54.6 percent of the vote in the Aug 20 poll, nearly double the 27.8 percent of his nearest rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, the commission said.

Voter turnout was 38 percent, which accounts for more than 5.5 million votes cast on the election day. Of that percentage, 42 percent were men and 38 percent were women, Daoud Ali Najafi, chief electoral officer told a press conference.

He said the election body had prepared ballots for more than 15 million eligible Afghans to cast their votes.

The announcement came after European Union (EU) election monitors said that up to 1.5 million votes, one quarter of all ballots, had been manipulated or were suspected of having been subjected to tampering.

The UN-backed Election Complaints Commission (ECC) has also ordered an audit and recount of one in every 10 polling stations. Ballots from 2,516 of the more than 26,000 polling stations, where turnout was unusually high or one candidate got almost all the votes, have to be investigated, the commission said.

Both EU and ECC had said that the Afghan election commission must not release official final results before the ECC finishes investigating the more than 2,000 complaints it received.

But the Independent Election Commission (IEC), which conducted the poll, said the candidates needed to know where their supports came from and if they did not accept the results, they could still lodge complaints with ECC.

The deputy head of the EU monitoring mission, Dimitra Ioannou, said 1.1 million of the suspect votes were in favour of Karzai and 300,000 were cast for Abdullah, a former foreign minister.

“All of them need to be investigated,” she added.

But Karzai, in a statement released by his election team, slammed the election monitor’s comments as “partial, irresponsible and in contradiction with Afghanistan’s constitution”.

He stressed that it was up to the ECC to address complaints.

“We believe the only way we can have a legitimate result out of the current process is to allow the legal institutions to complete the process and refrain from interfering in their affairs,” the statement said.

Najafi also echoed Karzai’s team demand, saying, “They (The EU) are observers. Observers can observe the election and prepare a report, they don’t have the right to interfere in the election.

“If they have a recommendation, they can submit it to ECC or IEC,” he said, adding, “They cannot submit complaints, because that is the right of the (Afghan) people.”

ECC said Monday that the final results could take weeks as it was investigating more than 700 complaints that are classified high priority, meaning they are serious enough to affect the outcome.

The exclusion of fraudulent votes from the preliminary results could drag Karzai’s share of the vote to below 50 percent and force a run-off with his top challenger Abdullah. A run-off could be held around the end of October or the beginning of November.