The Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission’s (ECC) spokesperson Ahmad Zia Rafat told RFE/RL that the government should prevent such practices from being exploited during the upcoming national elections.
Rafat responded to a RFE/RL’s report in which one owner of a printing house in Pakistan's northern city of Peshawar printed phony ballot papers at the request of candidates.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the owner said that he had received orders to print ballots since the election campaign began in June.
"Each individual candidate who has referred to us has asked us to publish around 60,000 papers,” he told RFE/RL.
“We have not set a fixed fee for the publishing work. We have charged them between 200 to 300 rupees [$2.34 to $3.50] per ballot," the owner said.
Parliamentary elections, scheduled to take place on Sept. 18, are the second ones since the demise of the Taliban movement in 2001.
More than 2,000 candidates, including some 400 women, are vying for 240 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of Parliament.
Since the election campaign started in June, four parliamentary candidates, most of them women, have been killed.
Candidates are facing assassination and intimidation by insurgents, and rival candidates, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported.
"Insurgent violence, particularly against women candidates, was inevitable, but the government's weak response was not," wrote Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher at Human Right Watch, in a report released last Thursday.
"Taliban attacks and the broad lack of confidence in the Afghan government to conduct a secure election threatens its validity," she wrote.
A poll conducted by Gallup Organization found that Afghans distrust the elections and are concerned about security issues. These two factors could result in low voter turnout, according to Gallup.
In a similar poll taken just after last year’s election, which was fraught with allegations of fraud, Gallup found that 49 percent did not trust the electoral process. For this election, in a poll taken earlier in the year, 67 percent of respondents said they did not trust the process.
The Taliban has so far claimed responsibility for killing three parliamentary candidates. However, it is not clear who is responsible for the murder of a fourth candidate at the end of August.
The Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM), an independent Afghan rights watchdog monitoring human rights violations across the country, said in a report that 2010 has been the worst year in terms of insecurity since the fall of the Taliban regime with insurgents becoming “more resilient, multistructured, and deadly."
More than 1,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in armed violence and security incidents in the last six months, according to the ARM report.
