Abdullah’s Team Sees No Outcome from Election Meeting
Abdullah’s team said the election commission should make efforts to address protesting teams’ concerns.
by Anisa Shaheed
Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah’s campaign team at a news conference on Monday said the meeting about the elections in Kabul was politically-motivated, which could not lead to a solution.
A member of his team, Fazl Ahmad Manawi, said the process is not moving in the right direction and that it should be brought back to its legal path by the commission, otherwise, the situation will be further complicated.
He said the meeting was "pre-organized" in which the election commissioners treated some protesting campaign teams politically, not legally.
“The decision was made based on 'fraud.' It is evident that the people will stand against them,” Manawi said without mentioning any names.
According to the election monitoring groups, the Independent Election Commission has not succeeded to manage the concerns of the election campaign teams.
“The (election) commission was not precise in its format (during the meeting). The protesting campaign teams were not given enough opportunity to say their words and the commission could not respond based on the law,” said Yusuf Rasheed, head of Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan.
But the commission once again talked about its efforts to overcome its problems with the protesting campaign teams.
“There are efforts to begin the recount of votes in the seven provinces. If they do not succeed, the commission will decide on preliminary results,” said Mirza Haqpasrast, a spokesman for the commission.
During the Sunday meeting, the main demands voiced by multiple campaign teams and observers included the quick announcement of the partial results, the recount of the votes from the remaining seven provinces, and a decision about the 300,000 votes, which, according to protesting candidates are “fraudulent” and should be excluded from the total.
Multiple protests have been held during the past week over the disputed votes. The Stability and Convergence team led by Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and the Islamic Security and Justice team led by Hizb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar both held protests.
The 300,000 disputed votes are from over 8,400 polling stations. According to the Stability and Convergence campaign team, there are four categories of fraudulent votes:
• 137,630 votes that were flagged for irregularities.
• 102,012 votes that have timestamps indicating they were cast before or after the designated time on election day.
• Votes validated by duplicate photos or photos of photos.
• Votes from 700 devices and memory cards that are missing.