As Vote Count Gives Karzai a Majority, a Recount Is Ordered
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan election officials declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a majority of the vote based on preliminary results announced Tuesday, even as the United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the elections said it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount.
A poster for President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. Preliminary Afghan election results gave Mr. Karzai 54.1 percent of the vote.
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Abdullah Abdullah at his home in Kabul on Tuesday. His campaign denounced Tuesday’s vote tally as illegitimate.
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Afghan election officials said that with votes from 91.6 percent of the polling places counted, Mr. Karzai had 54.1 percent, and his main challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, had 28.3 percent. The tally, if certified, would mean that Mr. Karzai would be declared the victor without a runoff because he received more than 50 percent of the vote.
But international election officials and observers immediately cast doubt on those figures, warning that the new results were severely tainted by large-scale ballot stuffing. Hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes are included in the count, they said — an amount that could prove to be the margin Mr. Karzai needs to win the election outright.
The United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, an Afghan and international panel, on Tuesday ordered a recount of ballot boxes where turnout was exceptionally high or where one candidate won 95 percent or more of votes at polling stations that had at least 100 ballots cast.
One Western official said that had the Afghan Independent Election Commission not decided on Monday to undo a decision it made the day before to enforce stricter safeguards, Mr. Karzai’s vote total would still be under 50 percent, forcing him into a second election against Mr. Abdullah.
The election commission had moved on Sunday to carry out precautions intended to catch a number of voting irregularities. But as it became clear that those safeguards would prevent Mr. Karzai from surpassing the 50 percent threshold, the decision was reversed Monday, and the election commission announced that it had no legal authority to exclude the ballots, the Western official said.
“He was below 50 percent when you exclude the obviously fraudulent votes,” said the official, who spoke anonymously according to diplomatic protocol.
Some United Nations staff members were so “disgusted” by the election commission’s refusal to enforce more reasonable safeguards that most of the normal complement of staff members who would have attended the commission’s news conference on Tuesday boycotted the event instead, said one staff member, who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the matter.
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