Afghans once again defied Taliban’s threats and voted in fourth presidential elections since the militant group’s ouster in 2001.
Men and women across Afghanistan turned out on Saturday to cast their votes for presidential runners, among them incumbent President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive officer Abdullah Abdullah as frontrunners.
The voting kicked off at 7:00am local time, and was supposed to end at 3:00pm, but the Independent Election Commission (IEC) extended the time by two hours until 5:00 pm because voting in some of the polling centers started with a delay due numerous challenges.
IEC said they had sent electoral material to 4,942 polling centers across the country, but were unable to make contact with 901 centers mostly due to a Taliban blockade on telecommunication in some rural areas of the country, so the fate of those polling centers was unclear to whether voting was held there or not.
Despite delayed twice, the elections were again marred by widespread irregularities, including absence of voters name from the voters list and problems with the function of biometric devices. In some polling centers, voters names were not found on the voters list, though, they had registered themselves in those specific voting centers. In other cases, the biometric devices were unable to find names of some of the voters.
After so many complaints in media and social media, IEC released a decree and ordered its staff to let those whose names were either on the list or biometric device to vote, but there were still many others whose names were neither on the list nor the device. Most of them were disenfranchised because of the IEC’s failure to properly manage the voter list.
Lack of training for IEC staff was another challenge. Voters in some provinces were complaining that temporary employees of IEC did not have enough knowledge to properly use the biometric devices. Talking to a local TV, a woman in eastern Nangarhar province said so many women were deprived of their right to voting because of problems in biometric devices.
“We have been waiting here since two hours to vote. We are told that all the biometric devices do not work.
“Some of the women have already left without casting their votes. Women take risks and come to vote, so they should be provided the opportunity to vote,” she said.
She said an IEC employee was trying to solve the problem of the devices, but he seemed to be unable because of the lack of the technical knowledge.
Though the security incidents were less than previews elections the turnout was poor. Besides areas under threats, turnout was low in some relatively secure areas including capital Kabul.
Fraud and irregularities in past election eroded people’s trust in the democratic process. Though the government twice delayed the vote under the pretext of electoral reforms, it failed to restore the mass’s trust in process.
