The slow-moving audit of ballots cast in the run-off round of Afghanistan’s controversial presidential elections was briefly suspended by a dispute over vote count records, an Afghan electoral official said Sunday.
According to Independent Election Commission (IEC) Spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor, an unspecified number of documents which show the overall balance of votes recorded at a polling station were deemed void by a candidate’s team, which claimed that the data forms lacked a full name and signature.
As a result, the audit was suspended on Saturday evening until mid-afternoon on Sunday, after which an agreement was reached, according to the IEC.
Afghanistan on Thursday began a massive audit of the 8.1 million votes ballots cast in the June 14 second round of its controversial presidential vote.
The move was agreed upon by the two rival presidential contenders, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, following a deal brokered by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Shortly after the second round Abdullah claimed massive fraud had robbed him of victory and boycotted the vote count by withdrawing his team’s observers. The IEC official did not say which candidate had raised the issue of the disputed votes on Saturday.
With only 435 ballot boxes audited since Thursday, the audit process is expected to take weeks to finish.
The commission is supposed to process around 1,000 boxes a day, and had claimed it would finish within three weeks.
The bitter impasse over the vote to succeed President Hamid Karzai has plunged Afghanistan into crisis and raised fears of a return to the ethnic violence of the 1990s.
The audit is aimed at reversing a destabilising political crisis that has threatened to widen the country’s ethnic fissures as foreign troops prepare to withdraw after more than a decade of war.
