ISAS Briefs

The third election under the current Afghan Constitution was held on 5 April 2014. The question most often asked reflected nervousness on the part of both the Afghan administration as well as the Western powers that had a deep concern over the final outcome of the poll. Were the needed lessons learned from the 2009 election which was widely believed to have been rigged in favour of the incumbent President, Hamid Karzai? This time there was anxiety not only about the security situation but also about the logistics involved. The list of voters was initially developed in 2004, the first presidential election held under the new Constitution. For 2009 and 2014, the original list was simply topped up by adding the names of those who had become eligible voters in the meantime. "The authorities estimate that there were as many as 20 million valid registration cards before the start of the top-up exercise," one Western diplomat was quoted as saying. "That does not include the rumoured or surmised up to 5 million voter-registration cards that had been forged in Pakistan and Iran during the 2004-2005 cycle". There were rumours that forged cards were being sold in the market at between US$ 2 and US$ 5 per piece.