Afghans defy violence to cast their votes

AFGHANISTAN’S parliamentary elections entered a second day after delays caused by violence and technical issues, as a roadside bomb killed nearly a dozen civilians yesterday, including several children.

Independent Elections Commission Chairman Abdul Badi Sayat said more than 3 million people out of 8.8 million registered voters cast their ballots on Saturday.

The biggest turnout was in Kabul and the lowest in the southern Uruzgan province.

The results will not be released before mid-November and final results will not be out until December.

The first parliamentary elections since 2010 are being held against a backdrop of near-daily attacks by the Taliban, who have seized nearly half the country and have repeatedly refused offers to negotiate with the Kabul government.

The US-backed government is rife with corruption, and many Afghans have said they do not expect the elections to be fair.

Officials at polling stations struggled with voter registration and a new biometric system that was aimed at stemming fraud but instead created enormous confusion because many of those trained on the system did not show up for work.

The biometric machines arrived just a month before the polls and there was no time to do field testing.

The UN mission in Afghanistan praised those who had made an effort to vote despite the technical issues, many of whom waited in long lines for hours as polling stations remained open late.

“Those eligible voters who were not able to cast their vote, due to technical issues, deserve the right to vote,” it said. The Taliban had vowed to attack the election, and on the first day of polling at least 36 people were killed in nearly 200 attacks.