Afghanistan Begins Audit of Presidential Election

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Afghan election workers on Thursday began auditing the votes cast in last month’s presidential election runoff, monitored by American and United Nations observers.

The audit of almost eight million ballots cast in the June 14 runoff was part of a deal brokered last weekend by Secretary of State John Kerry to ease a dispute between the two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, that had threatened to fracture Afghanistan’s government only months before the NATO-led combat mission here is to formally end. Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani also agreed to enact broad changes to Afghanistan’s system of government in the coming years.

But first the audit must determine who will actually be Afghanistan’s next president. It is a huge undertaking that is expected to take three to six weeks and, officials cautioned, run into snags along the way.

Increasing the international presence here to handle the large volume of votes to be audited has proved a challenge. Many of the roughly 30 foreign observers who took part in Thursday’s initial auditing session were United Nations officials and American development experts who had been pulled off other projects. An additional 70 observers are being flown in from Europe and the United States, and they should be in place by next week, officials said. The American-led military coalition is flying ballot boxes from across Afghanistan to Kabul so they can be audited.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast throughout the day, has further complicated the audit. With sunrise coming before 5 a.m., and sunset not taking place until after 7 p.m., many Afghans are eating a single meal at the end of the day. For them, working a full eight hours is becoming an increasing challenge as the month progresses.

To accommodate Ramadan, Afghan and foreign officials are hoping to use two shifts of workers so that ballot boxes can be audited from early morning until 5 p.m. The officials said they expected the entire operation to be up and running by next week.

On Thursday, election workers and international observers went through only a tiny fraction of the votes cast at roughly 22,000 polling places across Afghanistan. They began in the early afternoon, after a final round of meetings between the campaigns, American and United Nations officials, and the leadership of Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission.

President Hamid Karzai, who had set Aug. 2 as the inauguration date of his successor, has said that he wants the audit done as quickly as possible. American and European officials agree, and they say a new president will ideally be in office before NATO countries meet in September.