Small Wars Journal

We Still Don’t Know Who Won Afghanistan’s Presidential Election

Wed, 11/13/2019 - 10:13am

We Still Don’t Know Who Won Afghanistan’s Presidential Election by Catherine Putz – The Diplomat

On Sunday, current Afghan Chief Executive and presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah withdrew his team’s election observers from an official recount of ballots following disputes over exactly which votes to count.

Abdullah called on the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to cease its recount of 8,255 polling stations. The core of Abdullah’s objection to the recount process is a dispute over what his team says are more than 300,000 “fraudulent votes.”

The 300,000 includes 137,630 votes quarantined by Dermalog’s servers due to “small mistakes.” Dermalog is the German company that provided the biometric technology used in the Afghan election. The rest consists of 102,012 votes reportedly cast outside of official polling hours, plus an unstated number of votes cast with duplicate photos or other irregularities…

Read on.