Karzai Slams Afghan Election Results: Partial Re-Vote Possible

International Officials Endorse One of the Shadiest Votes in History

by Jason Ditz, November 24, 2010

A large number of officials in the Karzai government, including President Karzai himself, condemned the results of the Afghanistan election, a vote marred by massive voter fraud and intimidation and months of disputed investigations.

The Afghan government seems to be looking at moving forward with indictments of those involved in the election. International officials seem to be fine with the results, but tensions domestically are on the rise, particularly with the ethnic Pashtuns bearing the brunt of the election bannings.

There is even a possibility of a partial re-vote in the Ghazni Province, where the dominant Pashtuns ended up losing every single seat in parliament to bannings. At least 24 of the winning MPs, about a tenth of the overall parliament, were banned after the fact.

Public outrage is going to be difficult to tamp down in this case, as virtually every winning MP was the beneficiary of some ballot stuffing in this election and the banned MPs don’t, on the surface, appear to be any more or less crooked than the rest. This has led to inevitable accusations that the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) responsible for the bannings, were picking winners.

The winners seem to have secured a solid opposition bloc against President Karzai, and Abdullah Abdullah, the runner-up in Afghanistan’s shady 2009 presidential vote, said he was comfortable his bloc could check Karzai’s powers.

Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari has promised further investigations into the election fraud and said it was inappropriate for the results to be released before the investigations had finished up.

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