KABUL, Afghanistan — Months late, Afghanistan’s electoral reform commission has delivered a list of proposals, in a critical step to holding overdue parliamentary elections.
The proposals, issued on Sunday, now head to the leaders of the national unity government: President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah. But just a day in, some of the reactions to the proposals made clear that they would not signal a quick end to the troubled reform process and the gridlock that has kept the government in crisis.
Observers noted that some of the proposals — including one that could strengthen factional parties in Parliament — appeared strongly weighted toward Mr. Abdullah’s view of how to change the system.
One of the most outspoken critics, Abdul Sattar Saadat, who as head of the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission was at the center of the election crisis last year, on Monday questioned the legality of some of the proposed reforms. In a sign of how some of Mr. Ghani’s supporters were sure to view the list, he characterized the proposals as a public admission that the presidential vote and the system that led to it were completely bankrupt.
“The moment President Ghani signs these, it means he is no longer the president of Afghanistan,” Mr. Saadat said in an interview.
The mandate of the current, shaky unity government, brokered by the United States after last year’s presidential election stalemate, has an expiration date roughly a year from now. Both Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah have agreed that constitutional change is needed, and Mr. Abdullah’s role in the government depends on it, given that his post of chief executive is also set to expire.
Constitutional change would require the formation of a loya jirga, a grand council of elders chosen in part by parliamentary elections. But the parliamentary balloting is already six months overdue because there has been no agreement on electoral rules.
All this has placed the government in a struggle against time to prevent a vacuum of legitimacy, amid deteriorating security and deep economic woes, officials and analysts say.
The recommendations of the electoral reform commission, which were presented to Mr. Abdullah on Sunday after a month of deliberations, include the allotting of one-third of Parliament’s 250 seats to political parties; the restructuring of the current election commission; the creation of a clear voter identification system ahead of future polling; and moving to an electoral system that divides provinces into smaller voting districts that can be easily quarantined in case of fraud.
Mr. Abdullah has lauded the work of the commission as exemplary. Mr. Ghani has yet to comment.
The most problematic of the reform proposals is the setting aside of 83 seats for political parties with a national constituency — essentially meaning that party leaders in Kabul would get to choose candidates for those seats based on the votes the party gets throughout all provinces.
Two of the commission’s members, Kawun Kakar and Shah Mahmood Miakhel, who are believed to be close to Mr. Ghani, walked out of reform talks in protest against that recommendation. They said that the talks had been hijacked by party representatives and that the change “disproportionately affected people in insecure areas,” where local parties cannot mobilize.
“In our conversations with the people, they were in strong support of making the constituencies smaller so there is a connection to the parliamentarian representing them, and accountability,” Mr. Kakar said. “We are vehemently against this because of the absence of accountable, democratic, national political parties.”
But Shah Sultan Akefi, who leads the reform commission, said the proposal to give political parties a share of the seats in Parliament to encourage their development had been around for years. Most of the commission members felt the time was right to act on it, he said.
“The way the Parliament is now, we have 250 representatives who have run as independents and who have 250 different views,” he said.
Former election officials said the idea to drastically change the electoral system had failed to gain traction when it had been brought up in previous years.
“In 2010, we proposed changing the electoral system, but there was no appetite for it,” said Abdullah Ahmadzai, a former chief operating officer of the country’s election commission. “My question is — what has changed since then to prepare the grounds for it now? Unfortunately, I think, the reform commission has not done its homework on that front, to engage the key influential players.”
It took Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah nearly 10 months to agree on the makeup of the reform commission, and at the heart of the delay was the fate of the election officials who oversaw the vote, which was widely seen as fraudulent. When Mr. Ghani first appointed one of his campaign allies as the reform panel’s chief, Mr. Abdullah strongly objected, his aides calling it an effort to exonerate officials accused of fraud.
Now that the reform commission’s recommendations include the restructuring of the election body, it might open the former officials to prosecution.
But Mr. Akefi, the reform chief, said the commission’s work was looking to the future, rather than investigating past wrongdoings.
“We are not prosecutors,” he said. “We neither had the mandate nor the intention to file cases against individuals.”
One of the major reasons for fraud in last year’s elections, Mr. Akefi said, was the lack of a clear list of voters. On Election Day, people can vote by presenting a voter card. Afghanistan is estimated to have roughly 12 million eligible voters, he said, but more than 20 million voter cards have been distributed over several elections. Mr. Akefi said that those cards should be declared invalid and that no future elections should be held without a clearer identification system.
Mr. Ahmadzai, the former election official, said registering all voters and then limiting them to specific local constituencies was “a massive operation” that was not logistically possible anytime soon given intensified Taliban violence. He said that rather than making the change a prerequisite for the parliamentary elections, the balloting should instead be used as an opportunity to create a verified voter list that is based on those who cast ballots and that could be perfected in future elections.
“There will be disputes again, yes, but a bad election is better than the alternative, which is no elections at all,” Mr. Ahmadzai said.
