Kabul, Sep 16 (DPA) European Union (EU) 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 subjected to tampering.
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. Abdullah received 28.1 percent.
The Independent Election Commission (IEC), which conducted the poll, was to announce its final preliminary result Wednesday evening.
EU chief election monitor Philippe Morillon criticized 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, Morillon argued. “We tried to deter from massive fraud. We did not succeed,” he said.
However, it was within the responsibility of the Afghans, and not the foreigners, to judge the election’s legitimacy, he added.
On Tuesday, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (EEC) ordered a review of almost 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.
EEC chief Grant Kippen said Monday the Afghan elections commission must not release an official final results before the EEC finishes investigating the more than 2,000 complaints it received.
