Election observers have suggested their will be a heightened chance of fraud during the presidential runoff now that the Independent Election Commission (IEC) has announced that it will add some 3,000 new voting sites and five percent more ballots per province for the second round in June.
Although officials maintain more available polling places on Election Day will necessarily mean more Afghans can participate, the head of Afghanistan Democracy Watch, Zekria Barekzai, said there would be no observers at many of the new sites planned by the IEC.
“It was expected that the IEC would not send the ballots to sites without observers, and instead send the ballots to the other 18 provinces where they are needed,” Mr. Barekzai told TOLOnews on Friday.
The IEC has certainly tried to appease observers, for instance, the 5 percent additional ballot papers that have been tacked-on for each province for the runoff. Observers, along with many in Parliament, had bemoaned ballot shortages in April and demanded the election commission rectify the matter in June.
During the first round of this year’s presidential election, 13 million ballots were printed by the IEC and close to seven million Afghans voted. For the runoff on June 14, the IEC has printed 15 million ballots, which are in the process of being transferred to voting centers around the country.
Yet the commission’s decision to add ballots across the board seems to neglect the fact that not all sites and centers faced shortages on April 5, and of those that did, many were caught up in electoral fraud.
“Before sending the additional 5 percent of ballots to the centers, they should have been investigated first,” an observer from Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai’s camp named Abdul Ali said.
Observers from both campaigns were in agreement about the misguidedness of the ballot additions. Their common fear was that extra ballots could make box stuffing easier.
“Sending additional ballot papers to the voting centers and sites will increase the opportunity for fraud,” Abdullah Abdullah team member Sardar Muhammad Rahimi said.
But the IEC has maintained its decisions were in order to address the issue of shortages in the first round, which, in part a product of a welcomed high turnout, caused Afghans in different places around the country to be denied their right to vote.
In a number of ways, the IEC’s changes for the runoff appear to be simply a redoubling of everything. Along with the number of sites and ballots, officials on Friday highlighted that there would be more observers representing the two candidates than there were in the first round.
“In addition to international observers, 70,000 observers will be representing the two candidates during the runoff,” IEC Secretariat head Ahmad Zia Amarkhail said.
Whether those observers will be able to be present at all the polling sites, including the new ones the commission plans to add, remains to be seen. The IEC has assured that the Afghan security forces have taken on responsibility for securing the new sites.
During the first round, the IEC used a total of 6,218 voting centers with nearly 1,000 others closed primarily due to security threats.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/observers-worried-about-new-voting...
