Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) officials from southern Kandahar province said on Sunday that votes from 17 polling sites have been separated out of the vote counting process for further review after suspicions of fraud arose from complaints filed by presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah. Election officials of nearby Helmand province have said votes from 13 sites have been isolated.
The announcements come over a week after Abdullah leveled accusations of aiding and abetting runoff fraud in favor of his opponent - Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai - against the Independent Election Commission (IEC). He then followed up those allegations with claims that President Hamid Karzai has supported the IEC’s actions.
Kandahar ECC head Shamsuddin Wafa said that the complaints filed by Abdullah’s campaign had led to the isolation of thousands of ballots from across the province. He said one of the polling sites was in Kandahar city and the others spread across nine outlying districts.
He also confirmed that the complaints from Abdullah’s team were primarily “against Independent Election Commission (IEC) employees and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai’s electoral team.”
Although Abdullah withdrew his observers from the election commissions and demanded the vote counting process be stopped last week, national election officials have pressed on with the process. The only clear developments his pronouncements seem to have caused were to prompt the United Nations to step in as a mediator and fuel tensions between his supporters and those of Ashraf Ghani.
On Election Day, reports emerged from Kandahar of observers being forced out of voting places. Abdullah supporters have also pointed to a surprisingly high turnout in Maiwand district as a sign of possible ballot stuffing, along with similar cases in a number of eastern provinces.
The statements of the Kandahar ECC head follow the announcement by neighboring Helmand’s ECC office that votes from 13 polling sites had been set aside for further investigation. The sites in question were located in Musa Qala, Gereshk, Nad Ali and Marjeh districts.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/votes-kandahar-helmand-isolated-un...
