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Afghan recount ordered; Karzai nears outright win

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-09 01:48

Kippen said he saw a ballot box with 1,700 ballots in Kandahar, even though the maximum should be 600. He stressed that the commission is making its decisions without considering the impact on the election.

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"We just take this on a complaint-by-complaint basis, and how that pans out, we really don't know and in many respects don't care, because it's not material to the work that we're doing," Kippen said.

Najafi, of the Afghan-run Independent Election Commission, said some vote numbers were "suspicious" and that the results "did not match with the reconciliation form" used to double-check results.

"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 complaint commission, which will decide if any can eventually be included in the official count.

The top UN representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, called on Afghan election officials to exclude ballots from the vote count that have "evidence of irregularities."

US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry met with Karzai on Monday and talked about the election, said US Embassy spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden. She declined to provide further details.

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.

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