Afghan Election Fraud Fears Rise
The New York Times reports:
A day after Afghan parliamentary elections, scores of accounts of local ballot stuffing as well as the suppression of voting like that in Nagahan are beginning to surface, especially from the troubled provinces in the south and east. It is too early to say how widespread the problems were, but in several provinces there were certainly irregularities, if not outright fraud, intended to help particular candidates.
“There’s not, so far, a clear indication of massive or systematic fraud, but there will very likely be quite a few cases of retail fraud combined with widespread irregularities,” said Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special representative here.
But retail, or localized, fraud is often all that is needed to sway parliamentary elections where the margins can be tiny. Each province is allocated seats in Parliament based on a rough estimate of its population. (There has not been a census in decades.) The top vote getters in each province win the seats.
In Herat Province, for instance, there are 17 seats, five reserved for women and 12 for men. So from a field of about 125 male candidates, the top 12 will go to Parliament. While the candidates at the very top may amass tens of thousands of votes, at the bottom, where 2,500 votes may be enough to win the 12th slot, the margins tend to be smaller.
At that level, it does not require much to tip the balance, and candidates who think they are close may try anything to manipulate the system, said Martine van Bijlert, a political analyst for the Afghan Analysts Network, who has tracked elections for the past several years here.
“You can manipulate how the complaint process goes as well as the voting,” she said. “What you see, for instance, is candidates sending in reports of other candidates doing fraud because disqualifying the votes from a couple of polling centers or qualifying them can make the difference.”
Tallies from remote polling centers continued to trickle in to the Independent Election Commission headquarters in Kabul on Sunday, increasing the vote count from 3.6 million reported Saturday to nearly 4 million. But 157 polling centers had still not reported at all, including whether they even opened Saturday.
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