Karzai leads in partial vote count in Afghanistan
August 25th, 2009 - 10:07 pm ICT by IANS
Kabul, Aug 25 (DPA) A partial vote count in Afghanistan’s presidential election has shown incumbent Hamid Karzai narrowly ahead with about 40.6 percent of the ballots, the Independent Election Commission said Tuesday.
Ranking a close second was his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah with 38.9 percent, the commission said.
It released the results from about 10 percent of the polling stations from Thursday’s election. The 524,444 ballots came from 21 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
“I want to emphasise, that these are partial results,” Chief Electoral Officer Daoud Ali Najafi said. “They could change tomorrow or they could change the day after tomorrow.”
The commission has said it expected to release the final results around Sep 17, but should the trend seen Tuesday continue, a runoff between Karzai and Abdullah would be necessary.
A candidate must achieve a majority of the votes to win outright in the first round of voting, in which 30 people ran. Otherwise, a second round is planned at the beginning of October.
Meanwhile, the 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 were registered, 35 of them of high priority.
Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said five million people had cast their votes Thursday. Election authorities had registered 15 million voters for the election, which took place under Taliban threats and rocket fire.
The Independent Election Commission’s tallies gave Karzai 212,927 votes to Abdullah’s 202,889 ballots.
In third place was former planning minister Ramazan Bashardost with 53,740 votes, followed by former finance minister Ashraf Ghani with 15,143.
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