Afghanistan's Election results

I am going to be blogging about stories I find interesting in the news. Too often I feel there is a lot of nonsense in the news and so I will give my perspective on these issues. I intend on focussing mainly on Canadian politics but with some foreign affiars as well.

The results from the Afghanistan election are in (with more than 90% of polling stations reporting): Harmid Karzai has won 54% Abdullah Abdullah has won 28% and Ramazan Bashardost has about 13% of the vote. There is significant evidence that there has been fraud with regards to 1 million ballots of the 5.5 million votes cast. To have 18% of the votes deemed fraudulent is disgraceful for the whole electoral system.

What is clear in the results however is that Abdullah Abdullah and Harmid Karzai are the two candidates most preferred by the electors. The Afghanistan electoral system involves having a preliminary vote for President; then the two candidates with the most votes in the preliminary votes will be the only two names on the ballot in a run-off vote. The run-off is not deemed necessary if a candidate gets more than 50% on the initial vote because with more than 50% support the run-off would likely be a foregone conclusion and simply waste time and money to run. However, with ridiculously low voter turnout of 25% and large accusations of fraud will anyone in Afghanistan be satisfied knowing the president won with 51% support under those circumstances? I would suggest that Afghanistan needs to have a run-off vote between Harmid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. This would give Afghanistan a second chance to run a fair election. The election should not waste 6 months going over 2000 accusations of fraud; instead they simply should declare that a run-off vote will be held that will be fair. Anyone that thinks they have more than 50% of the support should not object.

I am astounded by many of the accusations of fraud which I have read about in the news. Polling stations which return more votes than they were issued ballots. Boxes that get stuffed with 500 or 1000 votes all for one candidate. If a run-off were to be held I think it should be reasonably easy to organise scrutineers for each side. Scrutineers would prevent much of the fraud. On voting day both scrutineers could sign that the ballot box is empty to start and then both be present for the counting of the votes. After the counting is done they would then sign a slip with the official count and seal the ballot box in case of a recount. Then neither side could dispute what their scrutineer had signed off. This would stop much of the ballot stuffing and votes not being recorded.