Theres been a lot of self-congratulatory writing about the recent Afghan presidential votes, mostly from reporters based in Kabul, the Afghan capital, where things were safe and voting went well. Other more rural parts of the country were quite a different matter, as a superb young reporter, Anand Gopal, writes in Harpers Mag online. He spent time in Wardak Province where he saw ghost polling places and stuffed (i.e. fraudulent) ballot boxes at voting spots that were otherwise inoperative. Tom It was becoming clear by then that two different narratives would emerge from the election. One would take place in Afghanistan’s cities — which enjoy relative security, a vibrant press, international observers, and a developed political process, all of which helped hold the vote accountable. The other would unfold in the insecure rural areas, which are contested between the government, the Taliban, and militias. There, the election would be largely invisible to journalists and other observers. These areas also saw frequent ballot-stuffing and other forms of fraud during the troubled 2009 presidential and 2010 parliamentary elections, each of which had nearly a million ballots disqualified. The strong correlation between insecurity and fraud stems from the threat of insurgent violence, which impedes election monitors and campaign observers, paving the way for powerful local strongmen to pressure and bribe electoral officials. Yet the IEC had again planned to open polling centers across the insecure countryside, aiming for a total of 6,845, an increase of nearly 1,000 over 2010... This year, 389 stations had been scheduled to open in the province. A supervisor of the Wardak branch of an independent election-monitoring organization told us, though, that his team had either been unable to visit many polling centers because of security concerns, or had found them empty, indicating that the ballot boxes had been moved elsewhere to be stuffed... Given the IEC’s decision to open so many polling centers in inaccessible, insecure rural areas, the ballot-stuffing we found in Wardak is likely representative of a larger trend. In Andar district of Ghazni province, for example, the IEC had planned thirty-one centers — but when we contacted eleven villagers, each living near a different polling center, only three said that their centers had actually opened. In the insecure provinces where fraud had been most prevalent in 2010, such as Khost and Paktika, the IEC had planned for all centers to be functioning on election day, despite the inaccessibility of many districts — a recipe for ghost centers and ballot stuffing. harpers.org/blog/2014/04/the-ghost-polls-of-afghanistan/
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 19:07:39 +0000
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