The Independent Election Commission (IEC) has transferred 40 percent of the total data from the biometric identification devices, used in the recent elections, to its main server since the start of the process on November 6, an IEC official said on Wednesday.
The IEC has however resent the results of its assessment for some provinces to provincial offices, the head of the information technology department of the IEC, Sayed Ibrahim Sadat, told TOLOnews on Wednesday.
“The preliminary assessments of 31 provinces have ended,” Sadat said. “The only thing that remains are the forms which have been resent to provinces for reassessment and recounting.”
“The biometric information of 16 provinces has been transferred to the (main) server which shows 900,000 recorded. The damaged (biometric) devices are from Farah and a low percentage is from other provinces,” Sadat said.
The Independent Election Commission started transferring data from the biometric identification devices to its main servers on November 6. According to the commission, the process will be completed in two weeks.
Some electoral monitoring organizations said that a number of candidates are not happy with the recounting process.
“Candidates in some provinces are not satisfied with recounting of votes. They say that the recounting of votes should be done in the provincial center. This shows a lack of trust in election commission officials,” said Yusuf Rasheed, CEO of Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan.
Some election observers also questioned the need to recount votes.
“First, the votes are included in the data book and then are added to the result sheet. There is no way that the number of votes could be manipulated,” said Agha Sherin, an election observer.
“It is not a reassessment, it is recounting and there is no measure and standard that could separate white (valid) votes from black (fake) votes,” said Abdulwaheed, an election observer.
The parliamentary elections were held on October 20 and 21.
The IEC has said that the results of parliamentary elections from 32 provinces will be announced on November 23 and the results of parliamentary elections from Kabul will be announced on December 1.
The Use of Biometric System In Elections
The use of biometric devices was the result of government’s decision to hold a transparent election – following increased pressure by political parties.
Almost 22,000 biometric devices were purchased by government from a German company. The distribution to some provinces of the devices was delayed and election employees had problems using the new system on election day.
The government allocated $20 million to purchase these devices.
This comes a week after IEC overturned an earlier decision and said it will count the votes where voters’ details were not entered into the biometric system.
The IEC said that the voting process continued on the basis of the voters list at polling stations where biometric devices did not work, and that there was no reason to disqualify these votes.
Recently a number of political parties criticized the IEC for what they called poor management and said the elections had been riddled with fraud.
The parties’ representatives said at a press conference in Kabul the IEC had systematically deprived a number of people from voting in different parts of the country.
The parties asked the election commission to discard votes from polling centers where biometric devices were not used.
On October 20 elections, hundreds of polling centers failed to open and many others opened late. There were also technical problems with the biometric devices. Because so many centers failed to open, the IEC extended elections by one day and opened over 200 of the 401 centers that had been closed on the Saturday. Even then, many of these centers opened late.
Voters however were furious about this and criticized the election commission. They in turn accused them of poor management and claimed there had been numerous irregularities.
The parties said they will announce their final stance about the elections once their observers finish monitoring the process.
