Afghanistans Chief Executive and presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah warned on Sunday that his electoral campaign will use every legal means to stop the resumption of partial vote recount.
Abdullah accused the Independent Election Commission (IEC) for being biased toward his rival, the State Builder team led by President Ashraf Ghani. Speaking at a televised press conference, he said, the fate of 300,000 controversial votes must be identified before moving into the recount process.
The leader of the Stability and Partnership electoral campaign claimed that IEC has denied to provide a response about their legitimate demands, such as the invalidation of ballots cast before and after the Election Day and photos taken from photos.
He went further, and claimed that IEC is receiving orders from the State Builder team and acting like its "spokesperson". He also said the IECs independence and objectivity is under question.
In addition, Abdullah called on the leadership of the Afghan security forces to stay away from election affairs, and confirmed that an observer of his team has passed away after being wounded, during last night protest, in Kunduz province.
At the same time, the Council of Presidential Candidates also announced their boycott with the partial recount process, citing "transparency".
What are the disputed votes?
Afghanistan Media has obtained the following information from the Independent Election Commission:
According to the IEC, 26,586 polling stations out of a total of 29,586 polling stations were open on the election.
The commission received paper ballots from 25,566 polling stations, but it has corresponding biometric information for only 24,842 polling stations, and the election teams want the paper, "non-biometric" votes disqualified.
Of the biometric votes, the election campaign teams agree with the IEC on the validity of 18,850 polling stations - which include more than 1.8 million votes.
But the commission later added votes from 8,486 polling stations to the total tally, and intend to recount them with the rest.
The problem is that of these 8,486 polling stations, the election campaign teams have only agreed that the votes from 3,484 stations are valid, and should be recounted.
The election teams say that votes from more than half of these 8,000 polling stations---whose votes number almost 300,000--should not be counted for various reasons.
137,000 of the 300,000 votes in question were originally isolated by Dermalog, the German firm which provided the biometric devices. Dermalog flagged the votes for various irregularities and because of the suspicion of fraud, with instances like the duplicate use of photos, or photos of photos.
The disputed 300,000 also includes over 88,000 votes which came in before or after the accepted polling day hours.
The third category is votes from 724 polling stations that were electronically sent in to the IEC from biometric devices or memory cards that were subsequently "lost." Votes from these centers have been estimated at around 70,000.
Abdullahs New Stance
"We have decided not to participate in the vote recounting process. The commissions impartiality will be questioned if it does not review its decision (on resuming vote recounting) and our next decision will be made after that," Abdullah said.
"Votes from 2,400 ballot boxes have been entered into the server that dont have (biometric) data," Abdullah said, adding "There are more than 100,000 votes that came outside the valid time (Before and after the voting process started)."
"We want the ghost votes to be invalidated," Abdullah added.
He stated that the presidential candidates have sent several documents to the IEC and asked legitimate questions about the election process, but so far the commission has not replied to even one of them.
"Any ‘illegal decision on the election will create an opportunity for a crisis... I see an opportunity today for the Election Commission to rethink its ‘illegal decisions," Abdullah concluded.
LINK: https://www.ansarpress.com/english/11834
TAGS:
Ghani Removed From UN Heads of State List 
