EU observers allege large-scale fraud

KABUL (Pajhwok): The European Union Election Assessment Team (EU EAT) on Monday took note of the Independent Election Commission’s failure to give precise final tallies of the presidential candidates.

Ending months of intense negotiations and uncertainty, the IEC announced the president-elect on Sunday after the audit of the run-off votes conducted under the supervision of the United Nations.

EU EAT Chief Observer Thijs Berman said: “A political agreement has been reached on a future government and on a division of roles between the two candidates, after an unsatisfactory audit process.”

While welcoming the political will to secure stability in the country, he said the high proportion of fraud showed an unacceptable lack of respect for the votes of Afghans.

In a statement, Berman said: “The audit procedures, negotiated with both sides and therefore inevitably complex, have been at times inconsistently and hastily applied under high political tension.”

It contributed to an imperfect effort to separate fraudulent votes from genuine ones, with the EU EAT concluding that questions remained on the electoral process and on the final outcome even after the full audit.

The audit had failed to bring full clarity on final results, the chief observer maintained. “The political agreement reached should now be the start of a new era.”

The team, which assessed the entire audit process with up to 410 observers — a high number of electoral experts that allowed the EU EAT to be present at the audit of nearly half of the total number of ballot boxes from all 34 provinces.

“The assessment by the EU EAT, which has been detailed and accurate due to the high number of ballot boxes observed, shows clear evidence of large-scale fraud, mainly ballot stuffing.”

It said a relatively small numbers of polling station results were subject to full invalidation, while almost half of polling station audits led to recounts and partial invalidations. All provinces had been affected by fraud, in varying degrees.

pr/mud

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