Observers Announce Runoff Findings

Fuente: 
Tolo News
Fecha de publicación: 
16 Jun 2014

Election observers from the European Union (EU) and the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) held a joint press conference in Kabul on Monday where they released their preliminary reports on fraud in the presidential runoff election. 
 
While the EU delegation reported no fraud from the sites its monitors were located at on Saturday, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), one of the country's largest monitoring groups, said its observers documented a large amount of fraud across various regions. 
 
Thijis Berman, the head of the EU's delegation, corroborated the Independent Election Commission’s (IEC) claims that Saturday’s vote saw a higher turnout than the first round, pointing out that the actual voting process was much easier than the one in April because voters only had to choose between two candidates and there was no Provincial Council ballot.

The IEC on Saturday night said over seven million voters participated in the runoff, despite most experts originally estimating the number to be significantly lower than the first round.

The senior EU observer emphasized that his delegation documented no fraud on Election Day, and praised Afghan voters for their participation. “Anyone who tries to change the results by illegal means, by violence or by fraud, shows nothing but a shocking contempt of all the thousands of Afghan citizens who have cast their votes honestly and courageously,” Berman said on Monday. 
 
When asked about the allegations of fraud be brought against the Independent Election Commission’s (IEC) Secretariat chief Zia-ul-Haq Amarkhail, Berman declined to comment. He said only the legal and judicial organs of Afghanistan were authorized to address the issue.

Amarkhail has been accused of smuggling ballots out of the IEC’s headquarters in Kabul on Election Day, and presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday said he would not accept any results from the commission until the senior election official is suspended from his position and investigated. However, IEC Chairman Ahmed Yousuf Nuristani has defended his coworker and called the entire affair a “misunderstanding”. 
 
In contrast to the EU delegation, FEFA officials said that their observers recorded a number of cases of fraud, including ones that involved government officials interfering in the voting process, underage people falsifying voter cards and male voters taking the place of female ones, among other violations. 
 
According to FEFA’s report, most of the documented fraud took place in Paktia, Paktika, Balkh, Logar and Wardak provinces and was committed by government officials, IEC staff and the candidates’ observers. 
 
“The number of fraud is less compared to the first round, but some fraud was conducted in an aggressive manner, which indicates the interference of government organs in the process, meddling by the candidates’ supporters and partiality of some IEC staff at a number of sites,” FEFA representative Jan Dad Spinghar said.
 
At his press conference on Sunday night, Abdullah leveled serious accusations against the IEC, saying there was “endemic fraud” in the election process and suggesting the commission was largely behind it. Nuristani, as well as President Hamid Karzai reportedly, have urged Abdullah not to discredit the commission without first providing evidence to support his claims.  
 
The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) on Monday announced that a large bulk of the complaints it had received since polls closed on Saturday were against IEC employees.

 

Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/observers-announce-runoff-findings