UN ‘must prevent runoff disaster’

english.aljazeera.net 10-25-2009

Hundreds of thousands of ballots from the first round of the election were thrown out due to fraud [AFP]

A former United Nations official in Afghanistan has told Al Jazeera that the world body must act to prevent the presidential runoff election on November 7 from becoming a repeat of the “disaster” of August’s first round. Peter Galbraith, who was fired from his post after speaking about the widespread fraud in the first round, said that many polling stations where fraud took place should not be reopened and many members of the Afghan election commission should be replaced. Some polling stations reported more than 100 per cent turnout while others saw ballots hugely favouring one candidate. The massive vote-rigging led to almost one million votes for Hamid Karzai, the incumbent president, being thrown out, cutting his lead to below the 50 per cent threshold needed for an outright victory. ‘Partisan decisions’ Galbraith told Al Jazeera on Saturday: “It is now time to close down those ghost polling centres, these are places where a large number of votes were recorded but they never actually opened. “And … in each and every case where there was fraud election commission staff either committed the fraud, co-operated with those who committed the fraud or failed to report it. “All those staff need to be replaced, not just the 200 who are going to be replaced,” he said. “The head of the UN mission needs to stop pretending the independent election commission is an independent body. All its member were appointed by Karzai and it made partisan decisions at every stage in the process.”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Anti-War, Freedom, Justice, News, Protest, Vote Stealing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.