Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), on Tuesday reported that despite cooperation with the government and civil society groups, the election commission has not met its needs for female staffers to place at polling stations around the country for the runoff vote in two weeks.
Mr. Noor said that the IEC wants at least 9,000 female staffers at polling sites nationwide, but that issues surrounding literacy and traditional customs have made recruiting local women extremely difficult.
Although the IEC did not list the provinces that were posing the greatest challenge in recruiting female polling station staffers, commission officials did say it was primarily a problem in rural areas of the country, not the cities.
“In the first round of the election, the election commission facilitated women's to votes...but in the remote regions, we face insufficient female staff and it is a serious issue to the IEC, this issue cannot be settled in the short term,” Noor said.
Female voters made up over 35 percent of all voters who participated in the first round. However, election monitoring groups have said the shortage of female staffers for polling sites during the runoff could discourage female voters from participating.
Naeem Asghari, a representative of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), told TOLOnews that previous experiences suggest a lack of adequate female staff leads to small female turnout.
“The election commission should strive hard to recruit female staff for the polling stations in the second round, both FEFA and civil society institutions have recommended this,” Asghari said.
Election monitoring groups have, since the end of the first round, gone so far as to link shortages of female staffers with a higher probability of fraud. They have said that where there were no female staffers to screen female voters, men were able to vote in their stead, committing voter fraud.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/iec-faces-female-staff-shortages
