One in 4 Afghan Ballots Face Check for Fraud - NYTimes.com

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By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ARCHIE TSE

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nearly one in four votes in last month’s Afghan presidential elections were cast at polling stations now subject to a recount and audit for possible fraud, a huge number that underscores the possibility that President Hamid Karzai could face a runoff, according to an analysis of Afghan national election commission data by The New York Times.

About a third of Mr. Karzai’s 3.1 million votes were cast at polling stations that face a recount and audit of ballot boxes, according to The Times’s analysis of data released by the country’s Independent Election Commission.

The analysis suggests that the magnitude of the fraud review is far greater than what has generally been understood. Last week, election officials said about 10 percent of polling stations would be subject to an examination ordered by the Electoral Complaints Commission, a United Nations-backed organization that is the ultimate arbiter of election results.

But that figure vastly understates the scope of the fraud review, the Times analysis found.

Based on the criteria set by the Electoral Complaints Commission, almost 3,000 of the 23,000 polling stations would be subject to the fraud review. Moreover, those polling stations account for a large proportion of ballots, some 1.35 million of 5.66 million total votes, the analysis showed.

The analysis also shows that slightly more than a quarter-million of Mr. Karzai’s votes came from polling stations where he received exactly 600 ballots and no other candidate received a single vote. Polling stations were generally allocated 600 ballots apiece, though in certain cases they were allowed to borrow ballots from other stations.

All told, Mr. Karzai received nearly a half-million votes from polling stations where at least 100 votes were cast but no other candidate received a single vote.

Mr. Karzai won 54.6 percent of the Aug. 20 vote, according to the preliminary tally. But if his final total falls below 50 percent because votes are thrown out during the review, he will face a runoff election against his most popular challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, who won 27.8 percent of the vote.

Mr. Karzai’s vote count appears to be more vulnerable to the review than that of Mr. Abdullah. Only about one in eight of Mr. Abdullah’s votes were from polling stations subject to the recount and audit, the analysis found.

It is impossible to know how many votes for either candidate will ultimately be discarded or whether a runoff will be called.

One reason that such a high percentage of the total reported ballots will be subject to the fraud review is the large number of votes reported by nonexistent polling places, one Western diplomat said.

“The phantom polling centers had a vastly disproportionate number of votes,” the diplomat said, declining to be identified according to diplomatic protocol.

The official expressed concern that the recount and audit would be conducted not by examining every affected ballot box, but by statistical sampling, in which a representative proportion of the ballots are examined and those results used to extrapolate the total.

“That has the risk of underweighting fraudulent districts, and it could give Karzai a first-round victory that he did not earn,” the diplomat said. “Because of the uncertainties, it’s not a process that can reliably end the political crisis.”

Proponents of sampling say that it can be rigorous and statistically sound, and that it will speed the review so that if a runoff is needed the election could be held before harsh winter weather sets in and prevents another national ballot until spring.

The challenge “is ensuring that the sample size is large enough to eliminate the margin of error, so that the sampling is accurate and reflects the overall will of the people,” while promptly adjudicating disputed ballots, said Aleem Siddique, a United Nations spokesman in Kabul.

The Western governments financing Mr. Karzai’s government and supplying troops to battle the growing insurgency had once hoped that the Aug. 20 presidential election — the nation’s first since 2004 — would showcase improvements in the country’s governance.

But the reports of widespread fraud and ballot-stuffing, international observers say, have instead cost the Afghan government standing with its own citizens and weakened support in NATO countries for the eight-year-old war.

Some United States and European officials say the political crisis is also empowering the Taliban, which in many rural regions are already seen as a more effective and less corrupt local administrator than the official government and security forces.

President Obama, who is weighing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, said Sunday that the election “did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped.”

“There are some serious issues in terms of how the election was conducted in some parts of the country,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Mr. Karzai’s campaign aides, who have said it will be almost impossible for a recount to overturn Mr. Karzai’s lead, have lashed out at critics of the election as biased and irresponsible.

At a news conference last week, Mr. Karzai conceded that some government officials had been “partial” to him and some to other candidates, an apparent acknowledgment that fraud had occurred.

But he blamed foreign news media for exaggerating the fraud and said there was little evidence of widespread irregularities. He urged Western governments to “respect the people’s vote.”

In an interview on Saturday, the top officer of the Afghan election commission, Daoud Ali Najafi, said he did not know the total number of votes from polling stations subject to the recount and audit order by the Electoral Complaint Commission.

Two weeks ago, the commission declared that it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” and ordered a recount and audit of ballot boxes in any polling place that either had 600 or more votes, or had more than 100 votes with 95 percent of the ballots cast for a single candidate.

Asked whether Mr. Karzai could have one million votes subject to the fraud review, Mr. Najafi said, “Maybe.”

Mr. Najafi acknowledged that some voting fraud had occurred, especially in the country’s more dangerous areas. But he said he believed that at some polling stations all 600 votes were legitimately cast for Mr. Karzai or for other candidates.

“It is possible,” he said.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Kabul, and Archie Tse from New York. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.