KABUL (Pajhwok): Of the 29 percent of ballots from the presidential election that were audited as recently as Monday noon, 54,000 votes of Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and 31,000 of Dr. Abdullah were found bogus, officials said on Tuesday.
The statistics provided to Pajhwok Afghan News by one electoral team show that Ghani retains enough lead with 1,210,602 votes over Abdullah, who has bagged 1, 081,645 ballots so far. The total votes recounted hitherto amount to 29 percent of all ballots cast in the second round of the presidential elections.
As many as 1,170, 107 votes cast for the Ghani-led Change Continuity team were scrutinised until yesterday. Of them, 54,505 ballots were found fraudulent. Similarly, 1,060,709 votes of the Abdullah-headed Reform and Unanimity team have been reassessed and 31,857 declared factitious.
The fate of 40,495 votes polled by Ghani and 20,936 by Abdullah is yet to be determined. The figures indicate that most of Ghani’s bogus votes have come from nine polling sites, where more than 500 ballots were declared forged at each site. Four of these sites are located in the Panjwai district of Kandahar.
By the same token, three such sites are in southeastern Paktika province, where 595 votes from a polling station in Barmal, 546 in Sar Rawza and 590 in Orgun districts were adjudged fake.
A ballot box involving 510 votes from the Chak district of central Maidan Wardak and another with 900 votes from the Injil district of western Herat province have also been invalidated.
The highest number of bogus votes cast for Abdullah came from two polling sites in central Logar province, having 594 and 591 ballots, and one from the Janikhel district of Paktika provinces, with 579 votes.
According to the documents, 6,644 ballot boxes from Kabul, Balkh, Paktika, Laghman, Herat, Paktia, Logar, Faryab, Kandahar, Panjsher, Takhar, Ghor, Sar-i-Pul, Parwan, Badghis, Badakhshan, Baghlan, Nuristan, Jawzjan, Ghazni, Kapisa, Maidan Wardak and Zabul provinces are yet to be audited
In line the current audit trends, more than 200,000 votes of Ahmadzai and over 120,000 of Abdullah may be invalidated. But the Reforms and Unanimity team says a final decision on invalidation of the votes is yet to be taken.
Mujib Rahimi, a spokesman for Abdullah’s camp, said the exact number of genuine votes would be known after the invalidation process came to an end.
On the other hand, a member of the Change and Continuity team confirmed the authenticity of Pajhwok’s information. Daud Sultanzoy said a final decision on vote invalidation had to be taken by the Independent Election Commission (IEC).
Sultanzoy expected the process of invalidation would be set in motion in three to four days, but an IEC official said it would begin next week in the presence of members of two teams, as well as observers.
