Karzai Team Forged All 24K Ballots in 1 District: Charge

Ten times as many ballots as voters, say Western officials

(NEWSER) - Hamid Karzai's supporters set up hundreds of fake polling stations that delivered hundreds of thousands of votes to the Afghan president, even though nobody voted there, diplomats tell the New York Times. The incumbent's team created as many as 800 fake sites, existing only on paper. Karzai allies also occupied a further 800 polling places, keeping voters away and sending in their own results. Western officials say the number of ballots exceeds voters by a factor of 10. "This was fraud en masse," said one. More»

With early vote count due Tuesday, Abdullah alleges fraud

(NEWSER) - Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai’s strongest political rival in the Afghan presidential race, is charging his opponent with engineering widespread voter fraud in the southern and eastern regions, the Guardian reports. A watchdog group controlled by international officials, which says the official election commission is controlled by Karzai supporters, has received 225 complaints of voter intimidation and outright fraud, some 25 of which could affect the outcome of the election. Early election results are due on Tuesday. More»

(NEWSER) - The supposedly indelible ink used to mark voters' fingers in today's Afghanistan election rubs off easily with household detergent, raising fears of widespread ballot fraud. Campaigners for Abdullah Abdullah, the main opposition candidate, found they could remove the ink with minimal effort, and a Guardian journalist scrubbed his finger clean in a matter of minutes. It could spell a big problem: As many as 3 million counterfeit voting cards are in circulation in Afghanistan. More»

Widespread fraud reported in nearly a third of provinces

(NEWSER) - From stuffing ballot boxes to arresting election workers to, incredibly, haggling over the sales price of a vote, Afghanistan's election is so rife with corruption and fraud that the results are questionable in one-third of its provinces, reports the New York Times. And as a test of Afghanistan's nascent democracy, “From an overall democracy-building perspective it does not look rosy,” says one anonymous diplomat. More»

Cites Karzai's refusal to reform election system

(NEWSER) - The only contender to unseat Afghan President Hamid Karzai today followed through on his threat to boycott the runoff election slated for Nov. 7. Citing Karzai's refusal to overhaul the election system as impetus for his decision, Abdullah Abdullah declared a “transparent election is not possible” at a news conference—handing Karzai a second five-year term and potentially tossing the fragile country into an uproar. More»