Afghan presidential vote audit halted for 3rd time

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) has suspended the auditing process of nearly 8 million votes over disagreements on the procedure for invalidating votes.

The IEC has attributed the decision to the failure of the two presidential rivals to agree upon a procedure for invalidating votes, media outlets reported on Saturday.

The commission says the decision was made after the two candidates failed to reach agreement on the procedure for invalidating votes.

The IEC was further cited as stating that the auditing process will be suspended for several days to allow Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah to settle their differences over the issue.

The audit process was previously halted due to differences between observers of the two presidential teams regarding the invalidation of ballot papers which were signed by the voters.

This is while the UN mission in Afghanistan said on Saturday that Abdullah and Ghani have indicated to the United Nations that they support the IEC’s potential move to adopt the UN proposal for a regulatory decision covering criteria for recounts and invalidation of ballots as part of the ongoing comprehensive audit.

The proposal was presented to the IEC by United Nations on 24 July in the context of the technical agreement reached by the two presidential candidates, who asked the UN to propose the manner for the supervision of the audit, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a statement.

Preliminary results from the June 14 runoff election put Ghani in the lead. But Abdullah, who received the most votes in the first round of voting, objected to the results, claiming massive fraud in the vote count process.