Afghan poll body declares thousands more votes invalid

Afghanistan's electoral body Sunday cancelled thousands more votes cast in last month's parliamentary poll due to evidence of fraud.
Head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) Fazil Ahmad Manawi said that votes from 11 polling centres across the country had been invalidated, adding to a list of 130 centres that had already had votes declared void.
"The commission decided today to invalidate the votes from 11 polling centres," Manawi told a press conference.
"Overall, 141 polling centres have been invalidated so far and the votes of 202 other centres from different provinces will be reviewed," he said.
"We are continuing our work to separate fraudulent votes from clean ones," he added
Manawi did not say how many ballots were affected, but the IEC estimates each centre accounted for between 1,200 and 7,200 ballot papers.
The Afghan parliamentary poll drew a turnout of 4.3 million voters who picked candidates for the 249 seats in Afghanistan?s lower house of parliament.
Partial returns have been released for 24 of the country?s 34 provinces. Final results are expected at the end of October.
Cancelling the ballots is likely to intensify concerns that the election could descend into a fiasco similar to the presidential poll of 2009, in which more than one million ballots were cancelled due to massive fraud.
The IEC head said that 45 candidates from the September 18 Afghan parliamentary poll had been referred to the country's Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) for alleged electoral fraud.
"There was evidence that either these candidates were themselves involved in election fraud or fraud had been carried out in their favour," Manawi said.
He said there was also evidence of at least one provincial election chief being caught up in fraud.Observers have noted irregular voting patterns and higher than 100 percent turnout in some provinces.