Despite provincial council campaigns having started 10 days ago, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) has still not completed its review of candidates' qualifications. Many candidates who have been disqualified since the start of the campaign period have openly aired criticisms of the ECC.
"The weakness is in the Election Complaints Commission," recently disqualified provincial council candidate Said Naeem Kashfi said. "This Commission has been recently established and still does not have an office in provinces like Maidan Wardak and others."
The ECC has said most of the candidates it has disqualified so far lacked proper education credentials, or attempted to get by with fradulent ones. Some of the candidates were also eliminated for failing to meet the election law's baseline standard for popular support, which the candidates were supposed to show by providing a sufficient amount of copies of voter IDs from registered voters who support their candidacy.
"They have said that some of the cards that we had provided were not found in the database," another eliminated candidate named Muhammad Ghous Qaheri said. "We did not create the database, nor did we make the cards at home."
Some candidates who were disqualified recently complained that they had already spent money on their campaigns.
The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) criticized the ECC for the late disqualifications and questioned why it had published a "final list" of candidates back in the fall if there were to be a number of future changes.
"If it was planned that the ECC would review documents any time that they wanted and many candidates would be eliminated from the list, then there was no point in having anything called a finalized list," FEFA spokesman Muhammad Fahim Naeemi said.
The ECC did not offer any comments in response to the criticisms it received this week, but former ECC member Zia Refat suggested that the late disqualifications were likely a result of delays from other institutions needed to verify the validity of education documents.
"The Electoral Complaints Commission was responsible for reviewing and sending education documents to related institutions for verification," Refat said.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/ecc-chided-delayed-disqualifications
