Presidential Election result may change: IECC

KABUL (TOLO News): The Independent Electoral Complaint Commission (IECC) said on Thursday that its investigation may change the preliminary presidential election result.

Chaman Shah Etemadi, head of the secretariat of the IECC, said that IECC employees have faced problems in the course of their work in the provinces.

“Let`s come and sit together and investigate the complaints, to determine if the complaints are documented or not. If the complaints are documented, 50 complaints will affect the election result, but if the complaints are not documented, 50,000 complaints will not affect the result,” added Etemadi.

Meanwhile, some of the IECC`s provincial heads said they faced problems during their investigation of complaints.

Ahmadullah, a member of the Herat IECC, said: “We try our best to assess these complaints.”

Ashna Gul Bandawal, the Kandahar IECC`s head, said that his office registered 1,524 complaints claiming electoral crimes and 443 complaints claiming electoral violations.

“We don’t have access to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) database , and we demanded that the IEC and IECC (in Kabul) make this available to us,” Bandawal added.

Siddiqullah Tawhidi, a member of the special electoral reform committee, said, “if the IECC doesn’t have access to Dermalog`s system it means that they will not assess the complaints accurately.”

Based on the initial result of the presidential election, President Ashraf Ghani beat the competition with nearly 12,000 votes, and the chance of winning a second term election is close.

Abdullah Abdullah’s election campaign team, which has had a disagreement with the IEC over 300 thousand votes that they describe as “fraudulent,” said that the announced result is based on ‘fraudulent’ votes.