Afghan election panel changed fraud rules after voting was over

After it determined that excluding questionable ballots in Afghanistan's August presidential election would force President Hamid Karzai into a runoff, the country's Independent Election Commission voted to allow to them be counted, commission and Western officials told McClatchy . The Sept. 7 vote, which was detailed in commission documents reviewed by McClatchy , abandoned the tough standards to detect fraud that the panel had approved unanimously only 10 days earlier. This allowed hundreds of thousands of questionable votes to be included in the results, according to a commission official. On Sept. 8 , the day after the vote, the commission announced a new tally that boosted Karzai's count from about 47 percent to 54 percent of the vote–enough for him to avoid a runoff and claim a second five-year term if the margin receives a final certification. The decision to change the rules after the voting for Karzai's benefit has further strained relations between the United States and Karzai, who did not yield to pressure from the Obama administration to get the commission to reconsider the decision. The pressure included a call from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the day after the vote, said a knowledgeable Western official. Like other Westerners and Afghans who spoke to McClatchy , the official requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.