Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Afghanistan: Abdullah Claims Fraudulent Votes Counted

The leading Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah's electoral team on Monday accused the Independent Elections Commission (IEC) of entering "more than half a million fraudulent votes" into the database, calling on the Electoral Complains Commission (ECC) to review their complaints.
The new waves of complaints come as the ECC is finalizing their two-week long review of allegations of fraud and making the final decision on how many votes to be invalided.
Addressing a press conference in Kabul, Dr. Abdullah's team showed several tally sheets mismatching the ones entered into the IEC database.
"We are talking about more than 900,000 votes that need to be cleared," said Abdul Satar Murad, a member of Dr. Abdullah's team. "530,000 fraudulent votes have been entered in the system and there is no information about the 400,000 other votes. The IEC needs to provide an answer."
Mr. Murad said that more than 400,000 votes are undocumented for, stressing that the IEC needs to provide details about these votes.
Abdullah's team demonstrated ballots from 61 polling sites that were filled with the same handwriting in favor of the second leading candidate, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, which was entered in the IEC's database.
Abdullah's team warned the IEC that if the commission does not properly and lawfully handle the procedure, the announcement of final results will be far from transparent.
In response to the allegations, IEC spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor said that their system is working effectively and honestly.
"The IEC trusts its own system and different organizations were also present monitoring the process," he said.
The election commission is scheduled to announce the final results of the April 5th presidential elections on Wednesday.

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