After Afghan vote, complaints of fraud surface

Kabul: The farmers in Nagahan, a village in Kandahar Province, lined up early to cast their votes on Saturday, but there were no ballots and no ballot boxes, making the election seem a cruel joke.

"We waited until afternoon for the election material to arrive," said Haji-Qaum Jan Aka, 50, a village elder. "Then what did we get? Ballot boxes, but when we opened them there were no ballot papers, no ink, not even any pens."

A day after Afghan parliamentary elections, scores of accounts of local ballot stuffing as well as the suppression of voting like that in Nagahan are beginning to surface, especially from the troubled provinces in the south and east. It is too early to say how widespread the problems were, but in several provinces there were certainly irregularities, if not outright fraud, intended to help particular candidates.

"There's not, so far, a clear indication of massive or systematic fraud, but there will very likely be quite a few cases of retail fraud combined with widespread irregularities," said Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special representative here.

But retail, or localized, fraud is often all that is needed to sway parliamentary elections where the margins can be tiny. Each province is allocated seats in Parliament based on a rough estimate of its population (There has not been a census in decades). The top vote getters in each province win the seats.

In Herat Province, for instance, there are 17 seats, five reserved for women and 12 for men. So from a field of about 125 male candidates, the top 12 will go to Parliament. While the candidates at the very top may amass tens of thousands of votes, at the bottom, where 2,500 votes may be enough to win the 12th slot, the margins tend to be smaller.

At that level, it does not require much to tip the balance, and candidates who think they are close may try anything to manipulate the system, said Martine van Bijlert, a political analyst for the Afghan Analysts Network, who has tracked elections for the past several years here.

"You can manipulate how the complaint process goes as well as the voting," she said. "What you see, for instance, is candidates sending in reports of other candidates doing fraud because disqualifying the votes from a couple of polling centers or qualifying them can make the difference."

Tallies from remote polling centers continued to trickle in to the Independent Election Commission headquarters in Kabul on Sunday, increasing the vote count from 3.6 million reported Saturday to nearly 4 million. But 157 polling centers had still not reported at all, including whether they even opened on Saturday.

The totals are raw, reflecting only the number of paper ballots that were filled out. In the 2009 presidential elections, about 25 percent of the 6 million votes first reported were thrown out because of fraud or other irregularities, according to the Independent Election Commission and the United Nations. It may be weeks before there are final results.

The death toll for election day increased on Sunday from 10 to 12, as the NATO-led coalition reported that shells fired by insurgents at a military base in Kunar Province on Saturday missed the base and landed near a girls' school, killing two civilians.

And the carnage continued Sunday, when eight children in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz Province were killed when they were playing with an unused rocket. The provincial governor, Muhammad Omar, said the rocket was part of an arsenal the Taliban had been using on Saturday to fire at polling centers.

Meanwhile, observers and human rights advocates expressed dismay at the process in a number of places and said they were already awash in complaints.

In Khost Province, a member of the Electoral Complaints Commission said he had observed "widespread fraud" and that most of the ballot boxes would have to be examined. The province had few observers because of security problems, he said.

In Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan, a member of the Electoral Complaints Commission, Noor Hassan Abdulrahimzay, said his office had received 70 complaints on Sunday and it was still early in the day. Most involved problems at polling centers, including opening late, proxy voting and cases of candidates campaigning on election day, which is prohibited.

In Nangarhar Province, where the vote was fiercely competitive, 100 complaints had been filed with the complaint commission by 11 am, said Hejratullah Ekhtayar, a commission member.

In Kandahar Province, there were reports of fraud particularly in Daman and Spin Boldak districts, said Abdul Rashid Ziar, the complaint commission chairman in Kandahar. "We received complaints that agents of some candidates were stuffing ballot boxes in polling stations, which is true," he said "They did. There was fraud in the districts."

The regional director of the election commission in Kandahar, Abdul Wasi Alokozai, acknowledged that the complaints that voting supplies never reached Arghandab district, where Nagahan village is, were justified. "We prepared everything for them and handed it over to the security forces, it is up to them to make sure they reach the people in time," he said.

The Kandahar governor's spokesman, Zalmay Ayoubi, blamed a misunderstanding between the security forces and local election workers.

That was little comfort to the people of Arghandab, who now will have to wait another four years to cast their vote.