President Hamid Karzai won an absolute majority in Afghanistan's presidential election, according to a final preliminary result released by the election commission on Wednesday, according to dpa. Incumbent Karzai won 54.6 per cent of the vote in the August 20 poll, nearly double the 27.8 per cent of his nearest rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, the commission said. The announcement came after European Union election monitors said that up to 1.5 million votes, one quarter of all ballots, had been manipulated or were suspected of having been subjected to tampering. The UN-backed Election Complaints Commission (ECC) has also ordered an audit and recount of one in every 10 polling stations. Ballots from 2,516 of the more than 26,000 polling stations, where turnout was unusually high or one candidate got almost all the votes, have to be investigated, the commission said. Both the EU and ECC had said that the Afghan election commission must not release official final results before the ECC finishes investigating the more than 2,000 complaints it received. In Washington, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly refrained from criticizing the initial results. He said investigations into possible fraud should be allowed to run their full course. "We welcome this next step in the process, but caution patience to everybody to await the final certifying results," Kelly said. The Independent Election Commission (IEC), which conducted the poll, said the candidates needed to know where their support came from and if they did not accept the results, they could still lodge complaints with ECC. Voter turnout was 38 per cent or more 5.5 million votes on election day, Daoud Ali Najafi, chief electoral officer told a press conference. He said the election body had prepared more than 15 million ballots. The deputy head of the EU monitoring mission, Dimitra Ioannou, said 1.1 million of the suspect votes were in favour of Karzai and 300,000 were cast for Abdullah. "All of them need to be investigated," she added. But Karzai, in a statement released by his election team, slammed the election monitor's comments as "partial, irresponsible and in contradiction with Afghanistan's constitution." He stressed that it was up to the Election Complaints Commission (ECC) to address complaints. "We believe the only way we can have a legitimate result out of the current process is to allow the legal institutions to complete the process and refrain from interfering in their affairs," the statement read. Najafi also echoed Karzai team's demand: The EU "are observers. Observers can observe the election and prepare a report, they don't have the right to interfere in the election." "If they have a recommendation, they can submit it to ECC or IEC," he said. "They can not submit complaints, because that is the right of the (Afghan) people." ECC said Monday that the final results could take weeks as it was investigating more than 700 complaints that are classified high priority, meaning they are serious enough to affect the outcome. The exclusion of fraudulent votes from the preliminary results could drag Karzai's share of the vote to below 50 per cent and force a run-off with his top challenger Abdullah. A run-off could be held around the end of October or the beginning of November.
