Afghanistan begins sample audit of presidential vote

Oct 5, 2009, 15:16 GMT

Kabul - Afghan electoral authorities said Monday that it began auditing a random sample of ballots from country's hotly- disputed presidential election that has been marred by widespread allegations of fraud.

The final results of the August 20 has been delayed by weeks over allegations of fraud involving around a quarter of the nearly 6 million votes. President Hamid Karzai won re-election with 54.6 per cent of the vote, according to preliminary results announced by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) last month.

The IEC on Monday began a sample recount of 358 ballot boxes in the presence staff from UN-backed Election Complaint Commission (ECC), observers and presidential candidates' agents, the two commissions said in a statement.

The ballot boxes were randomly selected from 3,498 polling stations, where there were 600 or more ballots cast or a candidate received more than 95 per cent of the total votes cast in that polling station, according to the statement.

The ECC had initially ordered the ECC to recount more than 10 per cent of all ballots cast to determine the prevalence of fraud, but given the volume of the work and the time the process needed, the body decided to conduct a sample audit.

An official from IEC, who did not want to be named, said the recount process would take up to four days, but the final results would not be announced before the end of next week.

If the audit were to show that Karzai's share of the vote was below 50 per cent, however, the incumbent would have to face a runoff with Abdullah Abdullah, his top challenger and former foreign minister.

The IEC official said a runoff would have to be held three weeks after final results become available and before snowfalls made rural areas in central and northern Afghanistan inaccessible.

Analysts have warned that waiting for spring to hold the second round of voting could create a power vacuum and ultimately a political crisis, to the advantage of the resurgent Taliban.

The militants have already stepped up their attacks in the recent weeks. Sixteen US soldiers have been killed since Saturday, eight of them in eastern Nuristan province, where hundreds of insurgents attacked two military outposts.