KABUL, 22 October 2004 — With more than half the ballots in Afghanistan’s presidential election counted and outright triumph virtually assured for incumbent Hamid Karzai, attention turned yesterday to when the winner can be declared and how the losers will react.
Two high-profile opposition figures claim alleged fraud robbed them of victory, with both Karzai’s chief rival and the sole woman candidate telling AFP in separate interviews that the vote was manipulated and that they would have won if it was “free and fair”.
The latest vote tally at 6:00 p.m. (1330 GMT) showed Karzai on 2,813,429 votes or 56.2 percent of the 62.2 percent of estimated total ballots counted. He kept his wide margin ahead of rival Yunus Qanuni, his former education minister and the favorite of the powerful anti-Taleban Northern Alliance, who has 17.2 percent.
Based on the election commission’s estimates of total votes cast, US-backed Karzai needs to win around 1.4 million more votes to attain the simple majority required to eliminate a second-round runoff. “A runoff looks very, very unlikely,” said a Western election expert familiar with the process.
While Karzai could reach that tally by tomorrow, the winner will not be declared until next week at the earliest when all the estimated 8.16 million votes have been counted. “There will be no final official results before all the votes are counted,” a Western election observer told AFP.
Once the winner is declared, another month must pass before he is sworn in and forms his Cabinet. “If (Karzai) is the winner, he will not be sworn in before a month. There will be no announcement of the composition of the Cabinet before those 30 days,” a presidential palace official told AFP.
Election authorities must also determine themselves whether the poll was “valid” before declaring the victor and an inquiry into scores of alleged irregularities must submit its findings. Fourteen opposition candidates wanted the vote scrapped and re-held over charges of fraud, mainly arising from the partial failure on election day of indelible ink designed to prevent multiple ballot casting.
The United Nations said yesterday that all 18 candidates had filed complaints, individually or as a group, to the inquiry. “We hope that they (the panel) will be able to send their final report to the electoral commission in coming days,” UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.
The commission would not declare the final result until all the ballots have been counted and until it hears the outcome of the experts’ inquiry, he added. While Qanuni told AFP Wednesday that he would accept the election result “in the national interest” regardless of his claims of widespread fraud, other candidates have still given no commitment.
“We have accepted the panel ... but whether we will accept or not the results of the election I will not comment now,” Abdul Sattar Sirat, 67, a candidate from the Tajik minority, told AFP.
