Afghanistan’s Supreme Court announced today that it intends to set up a special tribunal to investigate the massive fraud and corruption in the September Parliamentary elections, after the Electoral Complaints Commission already certified the results.
After the embarrassing corruption of last year’s presidential vote, the parliamentary vote wound up even worse, with millions unable to vote and millions of additional ballots thrown out as illegal. Compounding the problem was that the ECC and the Independent Election Commission (IEC) were faced with such monumental amounts of fraud on behalf of all candidates that they simply wound up picking and choosing winners by disqualifying only select ones.
The result was a lose-lose situation, in which a number of popular candidates lost to less popular, and equally crooked candidates on the whim of the commissions. With so many votes thrown out (or never cast), it was unclear who the most popular candidates really were.
With the “final results” already out some in the parliament say that the Supreme Court can’t unseat them anymore anyhow, but the probe may well uncover even more corruption and further embarrass the international officials who rubber stamped the election as a “success.”
elections during an ongoing war is a farce to start with.
Maybe when the Afghan high court is done probing election fraud over there, they can come to the US and do some probing over here too.