A new controversy in Afghanistan presidential election surfaced as three electoral teams boycotted the vote recount on Saturday, reiterating their call for invalidation of quarantined votes and dismissal of election employees accused of fraud before any re-tally of the September 28 vote.
First, the Stability and Convergence ticket, led by incumbent CEO Abdullah Abdullah, announced their opposition to the vote recount and called on its observers to avoid attending the recount process.
The team stressed in a statement that it is pointless to start the process prior to filtering the “fraudulent votes.”
The statement added that all observers of the Stability and Convergence campaign team have been asked to avoid attending the vote recounting process in all provinces in order to “defend the people’s clean votes.”
According to the team, “over 300,000 fraudulent votes” will not be acceptable under any circumstances.
The Stability and Convergence campaign team has specified four categories of fraudulent votes: 137,630 votes, which are under server quarantine, 102,012 votes cast before or after election day, votes validated by duplicate photos or photos taken from photos, and votes from 700 devices and memory cards that were lost.
Later on two other tickets- Hekmatyar’s Islamic Peace and Justice team and Nabil’s Security and Justice team, followed the suit.
The tickets said that vote re-tally in presence of IEC and government employees accused of election rigging would be an approval of the criminal actions of them.
This comes as the Independent Election Commission, in a statement on Saturday asked all observers to attend the vote recounting process as early as possible.
The presidential elections were held on Sept. 28, and the announcement of the preliminary results was originally scheduled for Oct 19; but it was delayed due to technical issues and because further actions were necessary to “maintain transparency,” according to IEC officials.
Sources said there are rifts within the IEC over the vote recounting process.
An election commissioner, Mawlana Mohammad Abdullah, on Friday said he does not believe the IEC will be prepared to announce the preliminary results by the scheduled time, considering the capacity of the electoral body and the issues the process faces.
But on Nov. 7, the head of the Election Commission’s secretariat, Habib-Ur-Rahman Nang, said IEC teams had begun traveling to provinces to begin the recounting process.
According to Nang, the votes of 8,494 polling stations out of a total of 26,000 polling stations will be recounted.
