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Many Afghans are illiterate so today’s ballots included pictograms to help identify the many candidates. The World’s Jeb Sharp explores the use of symbols in Afghanistan’s presidential election.

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LISA MULLINS: Another thing about those voting papers. Many Afghans can’t read so today’s ballots included pictograms to identify and represent the various candidates. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: There were more than 40 candidates on today’s presidential ballot, which made it pretty large – almost like holding open a newspaper.

ISMAIL SAADAT: Each candidate has been given a number, then a box where the voter would tick off, and then a symbol, and their picture as well.

SHARP: That’s Ismail Saadat with the BBC in Kabul.

SAADAT: The symbol of President Karzai was the scale of justice and the symbol of his challenger, the former foreign minister Dr. Abdullah, was three kind of pots, water pots. And the symbol of another candidate was like a pigeon, a symbol of peace. Many different things, and nobody knows exactly what was the logic behind some of the symbols.

FOTINI CHRISTIA: This is a largely illiterate society, so a lot of these visual cues have great effect.

SHARP: That’s MIT political science professor Fotini Christia. She’s serving as an election observer in Kabul. She says the pictograms were more or less randomly selected. Candidates chose three out of a bag and then picked their top choice. But even so the final selections for some of the top candidates were quite telling.

CHRISTIA: Karzai has the scales of justice, which, given all the allegations of corruption against him, it’s kind of a slightly ironic pictogram to have. Dr. Abdullah has three tea pots and if one were to think about this as kind of three cups of tea and the type of coalition-building and alliances and discussions he’ll have to be involved in, that’s also a pretty representative sign.

SHARP: And another leading candidate, Ashraf Ghani, ended up with a bookstand with a Koran open on it. And he’s known as a man of letters, perhaps the most academic of all the candidates. I asked Christia if Afghans were confused by the large number of candidates, all with competing symbols. She said not at all.

CHRISTIA: That’s what they’re used to – visual cues. And this is a highly oral culture too, an oral tradition, so they remember tons of things they see because they just don’t write things down. They don’t keep notes. So these symbols are completely natural to them and so it’s kind of a second nature. That’s why they’re so prominent in this campaign.

SHARP: And the candidates’ choice of clothing was as well, Christia says. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times earlier this week, she described how President Karzai signals national unity through traditional Afghan clothes mixing and matching styles from different regions. She says almost all the candidates do some version of this, right down to their hats and turbans.

CHRISTIA: It means ethnic unity or ethnic exclusion, depending on what you choose to wear. And it definitely brings a huge message across, because people here are obsessed with ethnic identifiability. They want to be able to look at someone and immediately tell if he’s Pashtun or Tajik or Hazara or Uzbek.

SHARP: That obsession with ethnicity is one reason symbols remain so powerful in Afghanistan – a contradictory place where traditional ways die hard and new democratic ones are struggling to take hold. For The World I’m Jeb Sharp.

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