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Votes From Kandahar, Helmand Isolated Under Suspicion of Fraud
[Tolo News] Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) officials from southern Kandahar province said on Sunday that votes from 17 polling sites have been separated out of the vote counting process for further review after suspicions of fraud arose from complaints filed by presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah... the former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance government, advisor to Masood, and candidate for president against Karzai. Dr. Abdullah was born in Kabul and is half Tadjik and half Pashtun... . Election officials of nearby Helmand ...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan... province have said votes from 13 sites have been isolated. The announcements come over a week after Abdullah leveled accusations of aiding and abetting runoff fraud in favor of his opponent - Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai - against the Independent Election Commission (IEC). He then followed up those allegations with claims that President Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... has supported the IEC's actions. Kandahar ECC head Shamsuddin Wafa said that the complaints filed by Abdullah's campaign had led to the isolation of thousands of ballots from across the province. He said one of the polling sites was in Kandahar city and the others spread across nine outlying districts. He also confirmed that the complaints from Abdullah's team were primarily "against Independent Election Commission (IEC) employees and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai's electoral team." Although Abdullah withdrew his observers from the election commissions and demanded the vote counting process be stopped last week, national election officials have pressed on with the process. The only clear developments his pronouncements seem to have caused were to prompt the United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... to step in as a mediator and fuel tensions between his supporters and those of Ashraf Ghani. On Election Day, reports emerged from Kandahar of observers being forced out of voting places. Abdullah supporters have also pointed to a surprisingly high turnout in Maiwand district as a sign of possible ballot stuffing, along with similar cases in a number of eastern provinces. The statements of the Kandahar ECC head follow the announcement by neighboring Helmand's ECC office that votes from 13 polling sites had been set aside for further investigation. The sites in question were located in Musa Qala, Gereshk, Nad Ali and Marjeh districts. Posted by: Fred 2014-06-24 |
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