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Counting votes in Afghanistan

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Marco Werman speaks with Grant Kippen, Chairman of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission, about continuing complaints about election fraud in Afghanistan’s recent election.

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MARCO WERMAN: Meanwhile officials in Afghanistan are still counting the votes from this month’s presidential election. The incumbent, Hamid Karzai, is still in the lead. He has just under 46% of the votes tallied. Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, trails with 33%. But these figures may be suspect. You see election officials are also sorting through hundreds of fraud complaints. Grant Kippen is chairman of the Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan. He’s in Kandahar. Grant Kippen how many complaints are coming in?

GRANT KIPPEN: We’ve had just over 2000 complaints that have been filed since election day. What we do is when we get these complaints we prioritize them and at the moment we have just over 600 that are priority A complaints and those are complaints that could affect election results. You know quite often we get complaints with respect to irregularity say at a polling center or a polling station. So if we find that indeed there has been an irregularity and we decide that we need to exclude that ballot box, obviously the vote totals will change for those candidates who had votes in that particular ballot box.

WERMAN: And with these 600 priority A complaints is there a pattern to these complaints?

KIPPEN: No we’re getting complaints in from around the country. The top complaints really deal with irregularities such as ballot box stuffing and irregularities in the polling station on election day or with the counting process. So these are the ones that we’re currently investigating.

WERMAN: And how would people in Afghanistan actually go about lodging a complaint with your commission. I mean is it dangerous to even lodge a complaint in Afghanistan these days?

KIPPEN: Well we keep the identity of anybody that complains confidential so that’s not made public. We have offices in all 34 provinces around the country as well as the headquarters in Kabul and we have between 280 and 300 staff on at this point in time. So we have fairly good accessibility for individuals, organizations that would like to file complaints. We did a fair amount of public outreach through the election period and up to election day explaining the process to [INDISCERNIBLE] groups so that they understood how they can file complaints if that’s what they wanted to do.

WERMAN: We’ve heard reports of voters having gotten attacked and literally mutilated after voting. They allege that Taliban see the ink on their fingers and then they attack them cutting off their fingers. Are you empowered to investigate these kinds of complaints?

KIPPEN: Well we’ve heard these incidents that took place and unfortunately something like this does not fall within our mandate. We simply look at election day irregularities. This is more an issue that the police or the Afghan National Security Forces would need to follow up on and it’s extremely unfortunate that these incidents have happened – that people have suffered physical violence and also threats and intimidation in different parts of the country as well.

WERMAN: To the more banal ballot box stuffing complaints, how hard is it to follow up on that?

KIPPEN: Well there’s a number of techniques that we’re going to be using you know investigating these kinds of complaints. I mean we look at the returns that have come in, the ballots themselves. We can talk to witnesses. So there’s a number of different ways that we can go about investigating whether this offense has occurred or not.

WERMAN: Now if these complaints of irregularities are in fact true what then happens to the vote? Is there a recount? Is there some kind of runoff?

KIPPEN: Well that would really depend on the seriousness and how widespread these irregularities happen. At the moment we’re dealing with the complaints on a case-by-case basis. So what that cumulative effect will be we’re not sure. I mean we haven’t rendered any decisions at this point in time. So it’s still early days and I really couldn’t make any sort of prediction at this point on how that might play out.

WERMAN: Grant Kippen is one of three international commissioners at Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission. He spoke to us from Kandahar. Thank you very much for your time.

KIPPEN: Thank you.

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