The UN sponsored Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan announced today that it is ordering a partial recount of votes cast during the August 20 presidential elections.  The Commission based its decision on ”clear and convincing fraud” in a number of polling stations, even though election officials have declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a plurality of the votes.

The results are likely to be delayed well beyond the original September 19 deadline.  According to the latest count with 91.6 percent of the polling stations tallied, Karzai has 54.1 percent of the vote, while Dr. Abdullah Abdullah has dropped to 28.3 percent.  If avoiding a run-off election.

These fraud reports break new ground, and not in a good way:  unnamed Western officials indicate that supporters of President Hamid Karzai set up approximately 800 fake polling sites that garnered thousands of fraudulent votes.  Investigations also report that Karzai supporters took over another 800 polling stations and used them to cast thousands of ineligible votes for the incumbent.

This is beyond anything I’ve observed.  Indeed, it even beats anything I observed in the Balkans, including fifteen to twenty busloads of Serbian voters pulling up at polling stations just inside Bosnia in 1996.  We also recorded more voters than people registered in that discredited election.  In Nepal I witnessed this gentleman “assisting” every woman in his village to vote for his preferred party, akin to reports of families voting together in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately these reports only add to the pressure that the Obama Administration has to be feeling about its policy in Afghanistan.  But what is more disturbing is the the fact that American soldiers are dying to sustain the rule of a man who increasingly appears to be uninterested in free and fair elections.

The real numbers are anyone’s guess. Karzai’s supporters have stuffed so many ballot boxes that in some cases, there are more voters than people.  Such fraudulent activities do not bode well for a successful democracy or another Karzai led government.  Obama and his advisors have plenty to do in Afghanistan, but waiting for the Independent Election Commission to sort out this troubling situation is just another burden the administration doesn’t need.

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