Tuesday, September 8, 2009

As Vote Count Gives Karzai a Majority, a Recount Is Ordered

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan election officials declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a majority of the vote based on preliminary results announced Tuesday, even as the United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the elections said it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount.

Afghan election officials said that with votes from 91.6 percent of the polling places counted, Mr. Karzai had 54.1 percent, and his main challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, had 28.3 percent. The tally, if certified, would mean that Mr. Karzai would be declared the victor without a runoff because he received more than 50 percent of the vote.

But international election officials and observers immediately cast doubt on those figures, warning that the new results were severely tainted by large-scale ballot stuffing. Hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes are included in the count, they said — an amount that could prove to be the margin Mr. Karzai needs to win the election outright.

The United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, an Afghan and international panel, on Tuesday ordered a recount of ballot boxes where turnout was exceptionally high or where one candidate won 95 percent or more of votes at polling stations that had at least 100 ballots cast.

One Western official said that had the Afghan Independent Election Commission not decided on Monday to undo a decision it made the day before to enforce stricter safeguards, Mr. Karzai’s vote total would still be under 50 percent, forcing him into a second election against Mr. Abdullah.

The election commission had moved on Sunday to carry out precautions intended to catch a number of voting irregularities. But as it became clear that those safeguards would prevent Mr. Karzai from surpassing the 50 percent threshold, the decision was reversed Monday, and the election commission announced that it had no legal authority to exclude the ballots, the Western official said.

“He was below 50 percent when you exclude the obviously fraudulent votes,” said the official, who spoke anonymously according to diplomatic protocol.

Some United Nations staff members were so “disgusted” by the election commission’s refusal to enforce more reasonable safeguards that most of the normal complement of staff members who would have attended the commission’s news conference on Tuesday boycotted the event instead, said one staff member, who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the matter.

The election commission’s deputy chairman, Daoud Ali Najafi, denied any partisanship on Tuesday. He also rejected the suggestion that the commission was rushing out a result to show that Mr. Karzai was ahead, and insisted that all fraud would be investigated once the preliminary results were complete.

Reports of egregious fraud have marred the Aug. 20 presidential election and raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the Afghan political process as Mr. Karzai seeks a second five-year term.

The developments also put the Obama administration in a difficult position as it seeks to shore up domestic and international support for the expanding Afghan war. American officials have said little publicly about how they would respond to the vote-rigging accusations, but some Western and Afghan officials have said there was broad misconduct.

The complaints commission is investigating over 700 cases of suspected voting fraud that are considered serious enough to alter the result. But the task may take weeks, and the final results will not be certified until all complaints have been adjudicated.

The complaints commission is the ultimate arbiter of election results. But Western officials say they worry that any decision the commission makes that affects Mr. Karzai adversely will be met with accusations that foreigners are disenfranchising Afghans.

The Abdullah campaign denounced Tuesday’s tally as illegitimate. “We do not accept these results,” said Fazal Sancharaki, the campaign’s spokesman, who characterized the numbers as fraudulent. A Karzai campaign spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Nader Nadery, chairman of the Fair and Free Election Foundation of Afghanistan, the country’s largest election observer, said the election commission had issued a number of conflicting statements about the results that undermined the panel’s credibility.

“You cannot at all consider this result as final,” Mr. Nadery said of the figures released Tuesday.

Mr. Karzai made light of the problem of fraud in an interview published Monday in the French newspaper Le Figaro. “There was fraud in 2004, and there is today, and there will be tomorrow,” he said. “It is, alas, inevitable in a growing democracy.” He promised to accept the result whatever it would be.

According to the results released Tuesday, Mr. Karzai has 2,959,093 votes, or about 225,000 more than needed to top 50 percent of the preliminary tally released so far. Those numbers do not include results from more than 600 polling centers already excluded from the preliminary count.

Mr. Karzai enjoys a commanding lead over Mr. Abdullah, but if his final tally were to fall below 50 percent — after the complaints commission reviews all evidence of fraudulent voting — he would be forced to face off against Mr. Abdullah again.

Only months ago, polls showed that support for Mr. Abdullah was in the single digits. But he steadily gained strength as the campaign progressed — despite what he has described as coordinated efforts by Mr. Karzai’s government to throw the race to the incumbent through vast “state engineered” fraud.

Although Mr. Karzai has always been the strong front-runner in the race, he could be vulnerable in a second round if his predominance is shaken and political allies shift away from him.

Military Disputes Raid Account

WASHINGTON — United States military officials disputed a Swedish aid agency’s account of a raid by American soldiers at an Afghan hospital last week.

Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command, said Tuesday the soldiers were searching for an insurgent commander responsible for the detonation of an explosive device. The troops believed that the commander might be hiding in the hospital, in Wardak Province in east-central Afghanistan, he said.

“At no time did they threaten the patients or the staff, and at no time did they tie anybody up,” Captain Hanzlik said.

The Swedish agency, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, reported on Monday that American soldiers had stormed the hospital, broken down doors and tied up hospital staff members and visitors.