Discard fake votes before recount: Abdullah team to IEC

The decision was announced at an extraordinary meeting of Stability and Partnership team. The Tuesday night meeting was attended by political and national figures.
According to a resolution letter the team released, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) should deal with the four types of fraudulent votes including 127,630 unidentified votes, 102,012 votes that were cast beyond official time on the Election Day, around 700 missing devices and SD cards, and votes with duplicate faces.
 “This electoral team has strongly defended clean votes of the public as its promise with the Afghan people, we renew our commitment to not backing out of our promise until all fraudulent votes are removed from the counting process and we will not keep silence about violations taking place in the commission,” the resolution read.
It said impartial implantation of law and procedures, separating fraudulent votes from genuine ones and showing real votes based on biometric machine calculation with mentioning polling stations were duties of the IEC.
Abdullah’s team asked the IEC to completely remove fraudulent votes, keep impartiality in the process and deal with the four mentioned types of fraudulent votes in accordance with the law and procedures.
The statement comes two days after Noor Rahman Akhlaqi, in charge of observation of Abdullah’s team, at a press conference had said that no decision had so far been made about 300,000 fraudulent votes including over 137,000 quarantined votes and over 102,000 out of time votes.
Akhlaqi told Pajhwok Afghan News today that they had obtained the fraudulent votes figures from the IEC.
He said the IEC faced problems in making decisions during the last few days and it should provide information about fraudulent votes, votes polled out of time and votes cast with duplicate faces.
However, State Builder team led by Ashraf Ghani said that Dermalog company has removed out of time votes, votes with duplicate photos and votes cast by underage persons from the system and had shared its report with the IEC. He said there was no need for delaying the vote recount process.
Abdul Qadir Hothkhel, an observer of State Builder team, criticized the Stability and Partnership team and said, “Unfortunately some figures always cause pressure and create problems for the national process.”
“The time was wasted and the IEC failed to do its work according to internal procedures,” he said.
Pajhwok repeatedly contacted IEC officials, but they refused to comment on the regard.
This comes as the IEC recently announced that 1,843,107 votes were valid while more than 86,000 votes have been invalidated due to duplicate photos, pictured photos and votes cast out of time during phe Presidential election on September 28