Afghan Election Fraud Is Concern

Hamid Karzai is battling a resurgent Taliban, an expanded drug trade, deadly intimidation of voters and 17 challengers who want to turn him out as president of Afghanistan in the upcoming election.

Now there is another worry: voter fraud.

Concerned about reports that some Afghans have registered to vote more than once, the international organization overseeing the scheduled Oct. 9 election is planning to mark the hand of each voter with indelible ink so any who return can be spotted.

The number of people who have registered more than once could be anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000, Karzai acknowledged in a joint appearance Wednesday with visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“This does not bother me,” quipped Karzai. “This is an exercise in democracy. Let them exercise it twice.”

At this point, 9.4 million voter registration cards have been filled out in this nation of nearly 29 million. Election overseers from the U.N.-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body said more than 90% of eligible voters probably had registered. In a religiously conservative Muslim nation where women have long held second-class status, 41.6% of the newly registered voters are women.

The voter statistics were cited by Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers during an unusual joint visit to Kabul on Wednesday by the United States’ top civilian and uniformed defense officials.

“Your leadership team is showing great courage in your efforts to stabilize the country,” Rumsfeld said. “ ... There has been a campaign of intimidation, attempts to dissuade people from registering. The surge in registration that’s taken place throughout the country, I might say, has to be a tribute to the determination of the Afghan people to make this work.”

Another concern for the fledgling democracy is the nation’s high illiteracy rate. The paper ballot approved Wednesday is as long as a newspaper page and half as wide, with photos of each of the 18 candidates because half of the population cannot read, election advisor Julian Type said.

There also is a concern about voter intimidation. Two United Nations workers registering Afghan voters were among six people killed in a recent bomb blast at a mosque in the province of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. U.S.-led forces frequently have battled Taliban fighters and their allies in the vicinity.

On June 26, a bomb on a bus carrying election workers in Jalalabad, the capital of the eastern province of Nangarhar, killed three women. One day earlier, gunmen abducted and killed as many as 16 Afghan men from buses traveling through the central province of Oruzgan. The assailants allegedly shot their victims because they were carrying voter registration cards.

“Those who do not want Afghanistan to succeed tried their best to kill our people, to intimidate them not to register. We lost 12 registrars for elections in the past three months,” Karzai said.

The government, backed by the international community, is using 16 teams to secure election sites and discourage intimidation. Rumsfeld and Myers on Wednesday visited one of the teams, based in Jalalabad.

Before traveling to Uzbekistan, Myers spoke to U.S. troops in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

“You are integral to the successes here,” he said. “You are here because the United States of America needs you here.”