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200,000 ballots tossed for fraud in Afghan vote

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-08 17:02

KABUL: About 200,000 votes have been thrown out of the tally of Afghan election results because of fraud, an election official said Tuesday.

Widespread allegations of ballot-box stuffing and suspicious tallies are threatening the legitimacy of Afghanistan's August 20 vote as the country awaits final results. More than 650 major fraud charges have been lodged with a complaints commission.

The Independent Electoral Commission previously said that results from 447 polling stations were thrown out, and an official said that amounts to about 200,000 ballots.

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"The numbers were suspicious and the results did not match with the reconciliation form" used to double-check results, said Daoud Ali Najafi, the commission's chief electoral officer.

"In some areas the turnout was higher than the number of ballots we sent to the polling station," Najafi added. He said the ballots have been sent to the UN-backed fraud investigation commission, which will decide if any can eventually be included in the official count.

With results from 74 percent of polling stations released so far, Karzai has 48.6 percent, while top challenger Abdullah Abdullah has 31.7 percent. Karzai needs more than 50 percent to avoid a runoff election.

Najafi said he did not have a regional breakdown of the discarded results, but said investigation teams have been sent to Ghazni, Paktika and Kandahar provinces.

A senior Western diplomat alleged Monday that a majority of the votes in three provinces -- Kandahar, Paktika and Khost -- are fraudulent. Partial returns from each of those provinces heavily favor Karzai. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his work. Others have said there have been as many as 800 fake polling sites from which tallies came in.

Najafi said it was unlikely that 800 polling stations were faked, and said the most recent number of fraud-annulled stations he had was the 447 announced Sunday.