Kabul, Sep 16 (DPA) European Union election monitors said Wednesday that up to 1.5 million votes, one quarter of all ballots, had been subject to manipulation or were suspected of having been tampered with.
Deputy mission head Dimitra Ioannou said 1.1 million of the suspect votes were in favour of incumbent President Hamid Karzai and 300,000 were cast for his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.
“All of them need to be investigated,” she added.
In total, 5.5 million votes were cast in the Aug 20 presidential polls. According to the latest preliminary results, Karzai leads the polls with 54.3 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a run-off.
The Independent Election Commission, which conducted the poll, is to announce its final preliminary result Wednesday evening.
EU chief election monitor Philippe Morrillon criticised the planned announcement as a mistake. The EU mission called on the IEC to refrain from announcing more results before all accusations of vote rigging have been investigated.
At this point, any claim for victory would not be credible, Morrillon argued. “We tried to deter from massive fraud. We did not succeed,” he said.
