KABUL (Pajhwok): The Presidential Candidates’ Council has accused Ashraf Ghani and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah electoral teams of fraud in the last month presidential election, saying a million votes cast are invalid.
The council members held a joint press conference in Kabul, in which presidential candidates Rahmatullah Nabil, Ahmad Wali Massoud, Mohammad Shahab Hakimi, Faramarz Tamanna and Enayatullah Hafiz were present.
The presidential election was held on September 28 and primary results are expected on October 19 and final results on November 7.
Ahmad Wali Massoud, a presidential candidate, on the occasion said the government had said the election results would be announced in one day and peace talks would start on September 29, but none of them could be done.
“The Presidential Candidates’ Council wants fraudulent votes to be removed and counting non-biometric votes as valid is unacceptable to us,” he declared.
Massoud said the council would accept the results based on biometric votes and would never accept the results of invalid votes.
Another presidential candidate Rahmatullah Nabil said that the election was deeply rigged and the electoral team of Ashraf Ghani tried to count non-biometric votes as valid.
“We have obtained evidence that show candidates who used public assets for their campaigns had collected fake votes, now they are trying to use national treasury for creating demonstrations to force the election commission to count non-biometric votes as valid,” he said.
He said leaders of the national unity government (Ashraf Ghani and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah) gave money to governors and police officials of a number of provinces to stuff ballot boxes in their favor.
“Even biometric votes are not fully clean and they also need to be checked”, said the former spy master.
Addressing the international community, Nabil said, “We are hearing that foreign missions are very active these days and they want to (accept three million votes were cast on the Election Day) but I ask those ambassadors who interfere in our election, our people’s doubts would turn into reality that you are destroyers of Afghanistan if you did so”
He said the recent presidential election has no winner and it will go to the second round to decide a clear victor.
Another Presidential Candidate Enayatullah Hafeez said: A large number of people who went to polling stations to cast their votes were told that they had no right to vote, but when these people visited polling stations in the afternoon they were allowed to vote.”
He said this happened deliberately to get biometric data of an applicant but not allow him to vote so that another person could vote instead.
Hafeez said there was a polling station in which the total number of registered voters was not more than 1,500 but in the same polling station one candidate got around 2,000 votes.
He asked the IEC to ensure that votes in ballot boxes were checked with biometric devices so that the credibility of the vote was intact.
Another presidential runner FaramarzTamanna asked the IEC to separate clean and fraudulent votes.
He added almost one million votes would decrease from the total number of votes if fraudulent ballots were separated from clean ballots.
Earlier, the IEC has said that around 2.6 million people participated in September 28 presidential election.
According to Hafeez, officials of the IEC and secretariat should not be allowed to meet government and other officials.
Presidential hopeful Mohammad Shahab Hakimi read the council’s joint statement that said two government election teams ---- Ashraf Ghani’s and Abdullah Abdullah’s ---- had monopoly over the election and declared themselves as winners before the announcement of official results.
Misuse of government resources, systematic and government planned rigging, sale and purchase of votes, lack of IEC administrative capacity were some of the problems that undermined the eligibility of election, the joint statement said.
“Taking in mind the above problems and other issues, the Presidential Candidates Council believes that this election has no winner. The low turnout resulted in circumstances that show that future government will not have legitimacy to rule.”
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