It was an ominous warning of the violence that lay in store the next day. Taliban insurgents had threatened to make a target out of anyone participating in the country’s parliamentary elections.
A series of rocket attacks, roadside bombs, and sporadic gunfire throughout Saturday kept turnout at its lowest yet in the short democratic history of the newly independent state.
Even as counting begins at the beginning of this week, election analysts are already warning of “serious concerns” of widespread vote fraud. The results of the election are likely to test the U.S. government’s resolve to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan by July next year.
“If the elections do not yield positive signals, I think it is going to empower those who are skeptical [over withdrawal],” Ashley Tellis, an Afghan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters.
The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) said it had found “extensive irregularities” in the election process and urged election authorities to investigate.
When casting their votes, people are required to dip their fingers in indelible ink, which cannot be washed off for 72 hours. The process is meant to stop people from voting more than once, but on Saturday residents said that they had seen people washing the ink off outside the polling station and returning to vote again.
Security violations had occurred in at least 389 polling stations, FEFA said, adding that reports of ballot stuffing were also widespread as well as a “worrying number of instances of government officials interfering in the voting process to sway the results in favor of their chosen candidates.”
In an e-mailed statement, Taliban insurgents said that they had directly attacked 150 polling stations. A spokesman for Nato said that despite tight security, the election day had seen more than 500 violent incidents across the country—an increase on last year’s presidential polls.
However the number of fatalities decreased slightly; 22 people were killed on Saturday, compared to 50 last year.
The election—only the fourth in the country since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001—had the lowest turnout yet, with only 40 percent of the eligible population casting their vote.
The problems may have been due to security. The governor of Kandahar Province—the Taliban’s spiritual heartland—said that he had only narrowly escaped a blast at a polling center.
However they may equally have been due to logistics. Some 1,561 polling centers out of a planned 6,835 had to remain closed because of a lack of a security presence. In addition, election analysts reported that many women were prevented from voting because there was a lack of female election officers to take their votes.
Despite its failings, the election was hotly contested. There were 2,500 candidates standing for just 249 parliamentary seats, and posters were plastered throughout Kabul for the duration of the campaign.
The election results are expected to be announced by the end of October, but possible fraud investigations could delay the final appointments for a matter of months.
The outgoing lower house, or Wolesi Jirga, was known to include several prominent critics of the current President Hamid Karzai. The president could face fraud allegations, particularly if the new house is dominated by his preferred candidates.
“If, as a result of massive fraud, it turns out to be a sort of rubber-stamp parliament in the hands of the government, then we will lose that opportunity for checks and balances, which is expected from the Parliament,” said Abdullah Abdullah, the runner-up to Karzai in the 2009 poll, in comments to AP. “There is a possibility of people taking things into their own hands.”
