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Karzai was hellbent on victory. Afghans will pay the price
Afghanistan's presidential election is over, and it was a fiasco. The decision by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to cancel the second round and declare the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, the victor concludes a process that undermined Afghanistan's nascent democracy. In the US and Europe, the fraud-tainted elections halted the momentum for President Obama's new Afghanistan strategy and undercut support for sending more troops.
The election was effectively over on Sunday when Karzai's remaining rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, announced he would not run. Abdullah Abdullah did not withdraw because he calculated he could not win, as some have uncharitably implied, but because he knew the election would not be honest. Indeed, in an honest election, he might have had a chance.
In the first round on Aug. 20, more than 1 million fraudulent votes were recorded for Karzai, taking his total to 54%–above the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Two factors made this level of fraud possible: ghost polling centers and corrupt election commission staff. Under the guise of maximizing participation, the pro-Karzai IEC located at least 1,500 polling centers in places either controlled by the Taliban or so insecure that no one from the government side could go there. These centers never actually existed, but since the locations were inaccessible to candidate agents, observers and voters, it was easy for corrupt election officials to say they were open and to record hundreds of thousands of votes from them.
Much of the fraud was blatant. In many polling centers Karzai won 100% of the votes and results were recorded in improbably even numbers, such as 500 to zero. This made it relatively easy for the Electoral Complaints Commission, a UN-backed watchdog set up under Afghan law, to detect and toss out many fraudulent ballots. In the end, it excluded enough phony votes to reduce Karzai's total to 49.67%, setting up the runoff. Because it only needed to determine if a runoff was required, the ECC did not do a full recount but instead audited a representative sample of votes.