Daily Times

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan announced the preliminary election results on Sunday, wherein, President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani secured 50.64 per cent while his main rival, Chief Executive Dr Abdullah Abdullah, got 39.52 per cent and the other candidates only received 9.84 per cent of the votes.

Soon after the results were announced, the “Stability and Convergence” electoral team announced they did not accept the preliminary results for not being transparent.

Dr Abdullah’s electoral team accused the IEC of counting 300,000 fraudulent votes in the favour of the “State Builder” electoral team.

The “Stability and Convergence” have, so far, filed 4,000 complaints with the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC).

The IECC announced they would review the complaints and share the results back with the IEC within five weeks.

Seemingly, the 300K controversial votes will either be fully or partially invalidated, which will reduce the votes of President Ghani to a remarkable extent.

If he loses at least 12,000 votes, he will dramatically drop below 50 per cent.

Thousands of Afghan citizens in 20 provinces–mostly in northern and central provinces–marched on the streets and protested against the 300K suspicious votes. The IECC will take those moves into account and carefully verify them to ensure only genuine votes are counted.

On the other hand, if we assume the total population of Afghanistan to be round 40 million, only 4.55 per cent of the population participated in the 2019 presidential election. The legitimacy of the election will go under a big question mark if anyone securing only 2.3 per cent of the nation’s votes becomes the president.

In the meantime, the Taliban and the US are busy negotiating a political settlement in Afghanistan. If the peace talks succeed, the Taliban will integrate into the community and, of course, demand power-sharing.

Taking the above-mentioned matters into account, either the election will go to runoff or an interim government will come into being to facilitate the political settlement.

The writer is the founding editor of the Khaama Press News Agency, an influential news outlet with a special focus on the English language