Afghan commission declares votes cast in Kabul invalid

KABUL: All votes cast in Kabul during the October parliamentary election are invalid, Afghanistan’s Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC) said on Thursday.

Major fraud and mismanagement on the part of the Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) were two of more than two dozen reasons why the decision was taken, IECC spokesman Alireza Rohani said.

The election commission must now hold new elections in Kabul within the next seven days, according to Afghan voting legislation.

Mohammad Yousuf Rasheed, the head of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA), an independent election monitoring agency, said he does not believe the election commission has the capacity to hold a new election within the next week as stated under the law.

It is possible that votes in other provinces will also be declared invalid, and if that occurs, the election commission will face a “serious technical and operational challenge,” Rasheed said.

Baqi Samandar, a candidate from Kabul, said that generally speaking, the decision to declare the election invalid was “the right decision,” since so many things went wrong during the vote.

Parliamentary elections took place in 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces on October 20. Due to security problems and organisational difficulties, voting took place in 400 constituencies a day later.

In the province of Kandahar, voting was delayed by a week after a deadly attack on the provincial chief of police.

In Kabul, 1.6 million people were registered to vote and around one million people cast their ballots across 558 polling stations on election day.