Presidential race; Investigation into election fraud nears end

KABUL (Ariana News): Electoral complaints commission’s investigation and adjudication of thousands of complaints which allege massive fraud and vote rigging is drawing to a close, according to the tribunal’s spokesperson Qasem Ilyasi.

Ilyasi said on Tuesday that a vast majority of complaints – 90 percent – have been adjudicated and the process will end on Monday next week.

Primary results of Afghanistan’s controversial presidential race were announced two weeks ago after over three months of drawbacks over allegations of fraud and vote rigging.

The results followed piles of complaints flooding the complaints commission, which launched a major classification of all filed grievances. An aggregate of 16,500 complaints had been filed to challenge the primary output of presidential election.

With the commission authenticating most of the complaints, a runoff voting is not being ruled out.

This comes amid harsh criticism that the complaints tribunal doesn’t have the capacity to deal with this magnitude of complaints.

After the state election authorities announced the results, the incumbent president Ghani was the frontrunner with more than 50% of the 1.8 million votes. Chief Executive Abdullah who had almost 39% has been challenging the result claiming his rival Ghani had manipulated the polls and stuffed thousands of ballots including one third of his tallied vote.

Statistics show that the frontrunner Abdullah Abdullah’s team had filed 5,564 complaints, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar 3,711 complaints, the incumbent Ashraf Ghani 3,300 complaints.