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Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has a slim lead over his nearest contender for the country’s top job, early results have shown.
Afghanistan’s election commission said on Tuesday that Karzai and top challenger Abdullah Abdullah both have roughly 40 per cent of the nationwide vote for president with 10 per cent of ballots tallied.
“From the total 524,444 valid votes, his excellency Hamid Karzai has got 212,927 and his excellency Abdullah Abdullah has 202,889 votes,” a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission (IEC) told a news conference.
The commission said that Karzai had 40.6 per cent, and Abdullah had 38.7 per cent, but the vote totals are based on only 10 per cent of the country’s returns.
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Ramazan Bashardost, a popular Afghan MP who camps out in a tent near parliament and campaigned against corruption, got 53,740 votes and former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani 15,143 votes, the commission announced.
James Bays, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Kabul, said the results that had been released so far were non-contested ones and that the authorities had, so far, been able to tally only 10 per cent of the vote.
“This may definitely not be the final picture,” he said.
“I must stress these are preliminary figures. This all could change. We are going to get many, many more results.
“I spoke to one of the key figures in the election commission who said they wanted the Afghan people to have some confidence in this process and that is why they released this batch of figures. From now on, every day, fresh figures will be released.”
Fraud complaints
The partial results were released, while number of complaints of election fraud rose substantially.
The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission said Tuesday that it had received 790 complaints since election day.
Fifty-four of those cases were given “high priority” and were considered serious enough to potentially affect the outcome of the election, the commission
said.
The complaints had more than tripled since Sunday when 225 objections had been registered, 35 of them of high priority.
Karzai needs a simple majority of more than 50 per cent to avoid a second round run-off. Otherwise, a runoff is planned at the beginning of October.
Sources: Aljazeera and agencies