2009 Afghan presidential election

Under the 2004 constitution, elections should have been held no later than 60 days before the end of President Karzai's term in July 2009. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) originally recommended that the poll be held at the same time as the 2010 parliamentary balloting to save costs. However, politicians in the country were unable to agree to the details. Concerns about accessibility to mountainous areas in spring 2009 and the ability of getting adequate people and materials in place by then led the IEC to announce the elections would be delayed to August 2009. The opposition accused Karzai of attempting to extend his power past his term. In February 2009, President Hamid Karzai called on the Independent Election Committee to hold the election according to the country's constitution,{{Cite web The election date of August 20, 2009 was one day after the Afghan anniversary of the formal end of Britain's third attempt to conquer Afghanistan ninety years ago in 1919. ==Candidates==

. Forty-four candidates had registered for the presidential election when the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC) announced its official preliminary list of registered candidates on May 17, 2009. Three candidates withdrew from the race before the election took place, having thrown their support behind one of the top two contenders. Each presidential candidate ran with two vice-presidential candidates. Karzai filed his candidacy on May 4, 2009; he retained incumbent second Vice President Karim Khalili, who is from the Hazara ethnic group but exchanged the first Vice President Ahmad Zia Massood for Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a Tajik former warlord blamed by human rights groups for mass civilian deaths during the Afghan Civil War. The United National Front announced on April 16, 2009, that they would nominate former foreign minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah as their presidential candidate. Abdullah was foreign minister of the Northern Alliance from 1998 onwards, and was a dominant figure in the Alliance. He was appointed foreign minister in the interim government that was installed after the U.S. invasion. The first person to have declared his intention to run, Dr. Ramazan Bashardost formally registered for the presidential election on May 7, 2009, with vice-presidential candidates Mr. Mohammad Mosa Barekzai, a professor at the Kabul Agricultural Institute and Ms. Afifa Maroof, a member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and with a dove, a symbol of peace and liberty, as their campaign symbol. Bashardost openly criticized the government and accused ministers of corruption. While serving as the planning minister, he was critical of foreign organizations in Afghanistan eating up aid money meant for the Afghan people and later resigned under government and foreign pressure. Dr. Ashraf Ghani, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., and former finance minister, UN special advisor, and World Bank analyst, registered as a presidential candidate on May 7, 2009. At a time when many Afghans would have preferred to lessen the appearance of ties to the U.S. government, he had the distinction of hiring Clinton-campaign chief strategist James Carville as his campaign advisor. His close ties to Washington placed him among those that Afghans considered to be "Zana-e-Bush", literally "Bush's wives". Ashraf Ghani was also reported as the candidate most favoured by the U.S. for appointment to a "chief executive officer" position that the U.S. intended to insert regardless of the winner of the election. Mirwais Yasini, the First Deputy Speaker of the Afghan House of the People joined the race in March 2009. He was previously a member of the Emergency Loya Jirga convened in 2002, served as deputy of the Loya Jirga, and director of counter narcotics and deputy minister of counter narcotics. Shahla Atta, a liberal female MP and war widow also stood, pledging to revive the modernizing policies of 1973–1978 president Mohammad Daoud Khan. Other presidential contenders included the leader of the Justice and Development Party of Afghanistan Zabihullah Ghazi Nuristani; former attorney general Abdul Jabbar Sabit; former defence minister Shah Nawaz Tanai; Uzbek leader Akbar Bai; economy expert and current senior minister Hedayat Arsala; economist Mohammad Hashem Taufiqui; Sarwar Ahmedzai, a former member of the 2002 Afghan Loya Jirga who authored a 2009 country report for U.S. officials formulating a new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan; and others. Along with the presidential candidates, were 3197 candidates for 420 provincial council positions. A Provincial Council in each of Afghanistan's 34 provinces advises and works with the provincial administration, headed by a Governor that is appointed by the President. Prominent involvement of warlords According to human rights groups, at least 70 candidates with links to "illegal armed groups" were on the ballot list in the election. Karzai's other vice-presidential candidate and former senior security advisor Mohammad Qasim Fahim, along with Karzai backer and former energy minister Ismail Khan, have also been listed by the human rights group as among the "worst perpetrators." Better known as Marshal Fahim, the vice-presidential candidate is accused of having been a former Communist secret police chief, murdering prisoners of war during the 1990s, running private armed militias, and involvement in kidnapping and other crimes after 2001. Fahim, a key U.S. ally in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, had also previously served as Karzai's First Vice President and Minister of Defense, having been appointed to those positions in the interim and transitional governments installed after the 2001 invasion. Karzai is also being advised by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who is said to have first invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and has lobbied for an amnesty for warlords. Most prominently covered was the dramatic return, three days before the election, of General Abdul Rashid Dostum from exile in Turkey as part of a deal to help bring President Karzai to victory. After allegedly kidnapping and beating up a political rival, he was removed as Karzai's army chief of staff in late 2008 and disappeared into exile in Turkey. A key U.S. ally during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, General Dostum is arguably the most notorious of Afghanistan's warlords, accused of massive human rights abuses, including the Dasht-i-Leili massacre of up to 2,000 Taliban who were suffocated in cargo containers in late 2001. He is also alleged to have crushed one of his own soldiers to death by tying him to the tracks of a tank. Analysts have suggested that part of Karzai's strategy was to make deals with warlord allies to deliver large blocs of votes in return for key positions and influence in his new government or other significant promises. Involvement of drug traffickers Karzai's vice-presidential candidate, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, is also alleged to have long ties to drug trafficking, according to CIA reports from as early as 2002. According to current and former U.S. officials, Ahmed Wali Karzai was also being paid by CIA, and had been for the past eight years. The New York Times reported on October 27, 2009, stating: "The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade." Also alleged to have orchestrated much of the fraud in favour of his brother in the presidential election, Ahmed Wali Karzai was himself re-elected to the Kandahar provincial council in the August 20 vote. ==Campaign==

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said insecurity had "severely limited freedom of movement and constrained freedom of expression for candidates". Mr. Karzai announced that he would invite the Taliban to a Loya Jirga (a grand tribal council) to try to restart stalled peace talks. A May pre-election poll reported that over two-thirds, 68%, of Afghans thought their government should hold talks and reconcile with the Taliban, and 18% did not know or refused to answer. Only 14% did not support government talks and reconciliation with the Taliban. Karzai also said the country was growing in stature and would be able to prevent "foreigners" from jailing Afghans, referring to the foreign military forces operating in their country. According to Ramazan Bashardost, the insurgency was motivated by the presence of foreign military forces in their country, by the presence of warlords and human rights abusers in the Western-backed regime, by the corruption in that government, and by poverty. Bashardost vowed that he would not allow foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan if elected. Abdul Salam Rocketi, a former Mujahideen "freedom fighter" – whose name came from using rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down Soviet helicopters – and former Taliban commander, said he would announce an amnesty for all the insurgents if he won the election. The Election Commission accredited 160,000 observers for the election. The Afghan Free and Fair Elections Foundation, the largest local monitoring group, said that it would have observers at 70 per cent of polling stations but couldn't observe the remainder because of security concerns. A second debate took place on August 16 on RTA TV (the state broadcaster) and Radio Free Afghanistan involving Karzai, Ghani, and Bashardost, with Abdullah not participating. Pre-election polls The pre-election polls, funded by the U.S. government and conducted by Washington D.C.-based organizations, found Hamid Karzai leading his nearest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, by a wide margin, but suggested that he would not have the 50% support required to win the August 20 election outright, raising the prospect of a run off election in October. Opinions on the following people (International Republican Institute, May 3–16, 2009) First round †(Note: May figures were from responses to an open-ended question before the list of presidential candidates was known) Second round scenarios Karzai – Abdullah Karzai – Ghani ††(The International Republican Institute survey did not ask respondents about a Karzai – Barshardost second round scenario) The administering of public opinion polls for the 2009 presidential election was beset by numerous difficulties because of the lack of security, harsh geography, and lack of accurate demographic data, but analysts hoped that with improved sampling techniques the pre-election polls would be more predictive of the outcome than they were in 2004. ==Lack of security==

Despite the surge of 30 thousand additional foreign military troops into Afghanistan in the three to four months leading up to the elections, and major military operations in the weeks and days ahead of the election, 12 out of Afghanistan's 34 provinces remained classified as "high risk" by the Afghan Ministry of Interior – meaning limited or no government presence – casting into doubt the ability of over one-third of the country to participate in the elections. A week and a half before the election, the Afghan government announced that it had hired 10,000 tribesmen to provide additional security for the election in almost two-thirds of Afghanistan's provinces. The men were being paid $160 a month, would be non-uniformed, and would use their own guns to secure polling stations in 21 out of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. ISAF officials stated two days before the election that the 60,000-troop ISAF military force in Afghanistan would halt all offensive operations on polling day in order to help Afghan forces maintain security for the presidential election. The order to halt operations and divert forces to help security followed a similar order issued to Afghan forces by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Because of the lack of security, the full list of polling centers was only announced on the actual polling day. On election day, the Afghan election commission reported that only 6,200 polling stations had operated. In Kandahar province, the mayor of Kandahar city, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, said that he would not go vote. "For the last three years the security is getting worse, day by day," Hamidi stated. "Even a child understands that the election day is not safe." His daughter, Rangina Hamidi, a prominent women's advocate, said that it was not worth the risk and that she would not vote either: "''My message to the women of Kandahar is this: don't go vote and put yourselves at risk for nothing.''" Attacks ahead of the vote Already in the month preceding the election day, there was a rise in violent incidents, all over Afghanistan, including a suicide bomber attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7. An ISAF spokesperson stated two days before the election that insurgent attacks had averaged 32 per day in the last 10 days, but had spiked up to 48 attacks per day within the last four days. Among the major attacks reported: • On August 15, 2009, five days before the election, a suicide car bomb struck NATO's headquarters at the core of Kabul's most fortified district, in the equivalent of Baghdad's Green Zone. The massive blast that shook the city left seven people dead and 91 wounded, including several foreign soldiers, four Afghan soldiers, and a member of parliament. The attack, inside several rings of security around the fortified embassies and government buildings by the presidential palace, was confirmed by a Taliban spokesperson to have had as targets the NATO military headquarters (HQ ISAF) and the U.S. embassy less than 150 meters away, and to have been part of a campaign to disrupt the elections. • On August 18, 2009, two days before the vote, rocket attacks or mortar rounds struck near the presidential palace in Kabul, and a suicide car bomb attack on a NATO convoy heading to a British military base killed nine people and wounded around 50. One NATO soldier was killed and two others wounded. Two UN staff members were killed, and a third was wounded. About 12 vehicles were destroyed and several surrounding buildings were damaged by the blast. A suicide bomb attack at the gates of an Afghan army base in the province of Uruzgan also killed three Afghan soldiers and two civilians. • On August 19, 2009, gunmen seized control of a bank in downtown Kabul one day before the Afghan election. The bold raid was the third major attack in Kabul in five days, shattering the capital city's relative calm since the last major attacks there in February. Police reported that three fighters and three policemen were killed in the four-hour-long siege. Media blackout imposed In decrees issued two days before the presidential election, the Afghan government imposed censorship for election day, barring news organizations from reporting any information about violence between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. out of concern that reports of violence could reduce voter turnout and damage chances of staging a successful election. Low turnout could undermine the credibility of the election – and could also hurt Karzai's results in the election if not enough ethnic Pashtun people, who form his base of support, turned out for the vote in the insurgent-dominated south of Afghanistan. On the eve of the election, police at the Kabul bank beat journalists and bystanders with rifle butts to keep them away from the scene where the bloody siege had taken place. The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan called the Afghan government's limitation of media freedom on election day "a violation of democratic principles". The Afghan government also reported that at least 26 people were killed in the election day violence, including eight Afghan soldiers, nine police officers and nine civilians. The government figures were impossible to verify, however, because of the government-imposed ban against reporting any information on violence. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the number of election day attacks could actually be much higher than the government reports. By comparison, ISAF had stated two days before the election that insurgent attacks had averaged 32 per day in the previous 10 days. Rocket attacks, gun battles, and bomb blasts occurred across much of the country, closing scores of polling stations. The province of Kandahar alone was hit by 122 insurgent rockets. Rockets and mortars were launched into Kandahar, the second largest city in the country, Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, Tirin Kot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan, as well as other cities. In the capital city Kabul, militants took over a building before being killed after a two-hour shootout. The capital was also reported to have been hit by at least five bomb blasts. Violence in the aftermath of the vote On August 25, 2009, a few hours after the first preliminary results were released, a cluster of vehicle bombs detonated together in a massive explosion that killed at least 43 people and wounded at least 65 in Kandahar city, in the bloodiest attack since July 2008. The force of the giant blast, at the center of the city in a district that includes U.N. facilities and an Afghan intelligence office, caused houses and buildings around to collapse, shattering windows around the city, and sending flames shooting into the sky. People miles outside of town felt the rumble. The main target appeared to be a Japanese company that had recently taken over a contract to build a road that insurgents had stalled for several months. A Taliban spokesman denied responsibility, saying the group condemned the attack. On the same day, another bomb blast in southern Afghanistan killed four U.S. soldiers, bringing the total number of foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan this year to 295, making the 2009 death toll for foreign forces in Afghanistan the highest in the eight-year war since the 2001 U.S. invasion. On September 12, 2009, a day on which the IEC was to have announced the first full preliminary results, waves of attacks engulfed Afghanistan. At least 66 people – including 24 civilians, 5 U.S. soldiers, and 26 Afghan policemen, soldiers, and guards – were killed in violence that swept across the country. The bloodshed seemed to demonstrate the ability of insurgents, including the Taliban, to carry out attacks in most parts of the country despite the surge to a record number of foreign military troops in the eight-year war. Possible ethnic imbalance The lack of security and its effects on voter registration, polling station accessibility, and voter turnout – mainly in regions populated by Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes, which make up 32-37% of the country's population – have raised serious concerns about an ethnic imbalance in the Afghan election. According to leaders and residents of Pashtun districts, many voter registration centers in their districts never opened during the registration period and few people even left their homes, let alone registered. Provincial officials have also said that election registration teams rarely, if ever, dared to venture outside of the district capitals. On election day, Abdul Hamid, a tribal elder from Paghman District – a mostly Pashtun district bordering Wardak province – was reported as insisting that 40 to 50% of eligible Paghman voters had not received voting cards, and therefore could not cast a ballot. ==Election fraud==

Starting in December 2008, journalist Anand Gopal and others have reported extensively on the widespread instances of fraud in the voter registration process, with the registration rolls including "phantom voters" and multiple registration cards issued to a single registrant, amongst numerous other problems. Voting cards being sold After being informed that voting cards were being sold in the capital, Kabul, an Afghan working for the BBC posed as a potential buyer and was offered one thousand voting cards on the spot, for $10 (£6) per card. Samples provided were all authentic with the name, photo and home details of the voter on them. According to a pre-election report by the Afghanistan Analyst Network, a Kabul-based group of foreign experts, as many as three million voters on the register were feared to not exist. The huge numbers of vote cards issued for phantom voters have raised concerns about massive electoral fraud. In the days following the election, Karzai's main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, denounced the chairman of the IEC as working for Mr. Karzai. Foreign election observers have also criticized the Independent Election Commission as being full of Karzai appointees. As early as 8 a.m., only one hour after the polls had opened, officials at the U.S. embassy in Kabul were receiving complaints of fraud. Election monitor group FEFA reported receiving cases throughout the voting day of "improper interference" by local Independent Election Commission (IEC) staff in the voting process, raising continued concerns about the impartiality of IEC election officials. Their post-election provisional report also detailed cases of election officials being ejected from polling stations by representatives of candidates. In a further irregularity, the supposedly indelible ink used to mark the index finger of voters to prevent voting more than once was found to be easily removable in many instances – a repeat of a problem that had also occurred in the 2004 and 2005 elections. According to Havana Marking, director of a documentary on the elections, by 9 a.m. people were bleaching their fingers and casting ballots twice. The documentary makers filmed "a cafe full of young men laughing and deciding who to vote for the second time". ==Flawed election==

Western officials conceded the election would be flawed, admitting that there had been election corruption, that there was apathy, that the lack of security would stop some from voting, and that precautions designed to prevent fraud would be ineffective in many parts of the country where election monitors cannot go. The international community accepted that fraud would be inevitable in the presidential election, but hoped that it could be minimised to an "acceptable level where it will not alter the final result". ==Low voter turnout==

NATO officials announced in March 2009 that 15.6 million voters had registered to vote, roughly half of the country's population, and that 35 to 38 percent of registered voters were women. Those registration numbers were disputed, however, by the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan and media reports, which suggested widespread fraudulent activity in the election process. Figures released by the IEC on August 31, when the ballots from almost half of the country's polling stations had been counted, pointed to a turnout of only 30% to 35%. Most of the ballots counted to that point were from the north of the country. Independent election observers in the country almost all agreed that voter turnout was far lower than in the previous presidential election in 2004. In the Pashtun-dominated southern provinces, turnout was as low as 5–10%, according to one Western official. In some parts of the country almost no women voted. In Babaji district of Helmand province, where 10 British soldiers were killed in Operation Panther's Claw, a British offensive launched against insurgents a few weeks ahead of the elections, reports indicated that only about 150 people voted out of a population of 55,000. One election observer said no more than 15 people voted at the polling centre where he was based. In another Helmand province district of 70,000 people, barely 500 people voted, while in one town of 2,000 residents, only 50 people voted. The polls in Afghanistan, originally scheduled to close at 4 p.m. after nine hours of voting, had been held open an hour longer in a last-minute decision by the Independent Election Commission. In a joint report with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, issued October 21, 2009, after the release of the final certified election results for the August 20 vote, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan stated: :"One third of registered voters, a figure which is significantly lower than the previous elections, are understood to have cast their ballots," The figures of the Independent Election Commission, adjusted for 1,065,031 votes discarded as fraudulent, indicate a voter turnout of 31.4%: When the IEC released its September 16 uncertified final results with a total of 5,662,758 "valid votes", the IEC claimed a voter turnout of 38.7%. Following the ECC's official audit findings, the IEC's October 21 final certified results for the August 20 election presented a total of 4,597,727 "valid votes". 1,065,031 votes or 18.8% of the votes had been invalidated between the IEC's September 16 results and its final certified results. A proportional 18.8% reduction of the IEC's September 16 voter turnout figure of 38.7% gives a voter turnout figure of 31.4%. In an article published October 21, 2009, in Foreign Policy magazine, J. Scott Carpenter, an official election observer for the August 20 vote, placed the voter turnout at 30%. ==Post-election vote count and investigations==

August, allegations of fraud Ballot counting began after the polls closed on August 20, with official preliminary results to be declared on September 3, official final results to be declared two weeks after that on September 17, and a run-off, if required, to be held within two weeks after that. The scale of such a win was expected to provoke accusations of vote-rigging. Many complaints were deemed by the ECC to have been on a scale large enough to have altered the outcome of the poll, with the most common being ballot box tampering. Other charges included intimidation of voters, failures of the "indelible ink", and interference in polling. The deputy speaker of Afghanistan's lower house of parliament, Mirwais Yasini, claimed thousands of ballots cast for him had been removed from ballot boxes by opponents and taken away to be destroyed. He displayed bags full of ballots from Kandahar that had been discovered by his supporters. Yasini said the only option available was to "abolish the election". September, massive fraud alleged, sample-based audit According to a Western diplomat, hundreds of thousands of ballots for Karzai were from as many as 800 fake polling sites where no one had voted. The diplomat and another Western official sai Karzai supporters took over approximately 800 actual polling centers on election day and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of ballots for Karzai. The Western diplomat said: "This was fraud en masse." In Karzai's home province, Kandahar, preliminary results indicated more than 350,000 ballots had been turned in to be counted, but Western officials estimated only about 25,000 people had actually voted in the whole province. According to an IEC official and Western official in Afghanistan, the Independent Election Commission introduced a set of standards to exclude questionable votes on August 29, but when it appeared that the new exclusions would put Karzai's tally below 50%, the commission cast a second vote on September 7 to loosen the fraud standards. On September 8, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), dominated by U.N.-appointed Westerners, reported that over 720 major fraud allegations considered material to the outcome had been registered, and ordered recounts at polling stations where it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" in at least three provinces. The U.N.-appointed ECC chairman, Grant Kippen, said voting irregularities included unfolded ballots (that would not have fit through a ballot box slot), identically marked ballots, and overly large ballot counts, including a box in Kandahar with 1,700 ballots when the maximum should be 600. Dozens of voting sites tallied by the Independent Election Commission reportedly had Karzai winning in perfectly round numbers like 200, 300, or 500 ballots. With the IEC releasing the first partial results to show Hamid Karzai above the 50% threshold, the U.S. State Department called for a "rigorous vetting" of the electoral fraud claims. On September 10, the ECC ordered the invalidation of tens of thousands of ballots, mostly votes for Karzai, from 83 polling stations from three provinces. These included all presidential ballots from 5 polling stations in Paktika Province, either all presidential ballots, all provincial council ballots - or in some case both - from 27 polling stations in Ghazni Province, as well as ballots from 51 polling stations in Kandahar Province. The chairman of the ECC, Grant Kippen, said there would be no re-voting and that the ballots would simply discounted from the final tally. A source at the ECC indicated this was just the beginning of a process, according to a BBC correspondent. On September 15, the foreign-dominated ECC ordered a recount of 2,600, or 10%, of the country's 26,000 polling stations – many of them in southern Afghanistan – a move expected to strip votes away from Karzai. Because many of those polling stations had substantially higher turnouts than average, possibly the result of ballot stuffing, more than 10% of the vote could be affected. With the September 12 partial results showing Karzai at 54% of the votes, just 4 points above the 50% threshold, the ECC-ordered recount could potentially force a run-off election. On September 21, 2009, over a month after the election day, and after several weeks of wrangling, it was reported that the IEC and ECC had agreed to rely on statistical sampling in the interests of expediency instead of carrying out an in-depth investigation of all the alleged voting irregularities. Supporters of the deal claimed that streamlining the complaints review process would reduce political instability. Critics of the deal said that bypassing a full investigation of all the irregularities would undermine faith in the credibility of the outcome. News sources reported the IEC as urging the Electoral Complaints Commission to expedite their fraud investigations, saying that the final results must be released within the next ten days if the election commission is to be able to prepare a second round of voting before winter snow at the end of October makes voting impossible in parts of the country. Missing the window could delay any run-off until springtime, creating a power vacuum. September 12 partial results The IEC had previously announced that it hoped to release full preliminary results, on September 12, instead. On that date, however, they announced that the count was still not complete and that there would be another delay, with no date known. The partial results released by the IEC on September 12, tallied from the ballots of 93% of polling stations, showed Karzai slightly further in the lead and Abdullah slightly further lagging: The day was accompanied by a spate of violence in which at least 66 people were killed in gunbattles, suicide strikes, and roadside bombs. The dead included 24 civilians, 5 foreign soldiers, 7 Afghan soldiers, 12 Afghan policemen, 7 security firm guards, and at least 11 militants. Attacks occurred in all corners of the country – not only in the south and east, but also in the west and north that had been comparatively quiet until recent weeks around the election – signalling an expanding insurgency despite record numbers of U.S. and coalition troops in the eight-year war since the 2001 U.S. invasion. • Hamid Karzai – 3,093,256 votes, 54.6% • Abdullah Abdullah – 1,571,581 votes, 27.8% • Ramazan Bashardost – 520,627 votes, 9.2% • Ashraf Ghani – 155,343–2.7% Total Valid Votes: 5,662,758. The IEC claimed that voter turnout was 38.7%. However, anectdotal evidence from observers suggests it was much lower. More than 2,800 complaints were registered with the ECC, including complaints involving polling day and the ballot counting process, with 726 allegations that the ECC categorized as serious enough to have affected the outcome. The European Union election observer mission had previously declared the election process to be generally "good and fair", shortly after voting day. The figures alleged by the EU deputy chief observer represented approximately 36%, 19%, and 18% of the votes counted for Karzai, Abdullah, and Bashardost, respectively. Invalidating the 1.5 million ballots would reduce the already low voter turnout figure to under 27%. October, ruling of the ECC awaited, run-off possibility The timeframes mentioned at the end of September for a decision about a run-off did not appear to hold however: The recount of the random sample of 10% of suspect ballot boxes finally only began nine days later, on October 5. On October 11, the recount of the 10% sample of suspect ballot boxes was reported to be completed, with results to be announced within a few days. The head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, stated that vote fraud in the Afghan election had been "widespread". He refused to reveal any numbers however, saying "any specific figures would be speculative". On October 12, just days before results of the audit were expected to be announced, the chairman of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), Canadian Grant Kippen, told reporters that the ECC had misinterpreted the statistical analysis to determine the percentage of votes that would be voided for each candidate in ballot boxes deemed suspect. The week before, the ECC had stated that each candidate would lose votes in proportion to the number of fraudulent ballots cast for them in a random sampling of ballots boxes deemed suspect. Under the new ECC interpretation, the commission divides suspect ballot stations into six categories of reason for suspicion, and disqualifies the same percentage from each candidate's total ballots within each category. According to an Associated Press article: "That means votes legitimately cast for a candidate could be canceled if they were found in ballot boxes that were deemed to have been stuffed in favor of another contender." On the same day, in a blow for the UN-backed complaints body's credibility, one of the two Afghan members of the five-member ECC resigned, stating "foreign interference" on the part of the three Western members – an American, a Canadian, and a Dutch – of the complaints body. Karzai fielded a flurry of visits and phone calls from U.S. and other Western officials pressing him to accept the delayed U.N.-led audit results, enter into a power-sharing deal with Abdullah, or otherwise avert a crisis in the contended election. Among the American officials working the phones were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard C. Holbrooke, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. In Afghanistan, U.S. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, met with Karzai at least twice, and Abdullah once, stressing "the necessity of a legitimate outcome," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel indicated in veiled criticism of Karzai that it would be 'reckless' for the U.S. to commit more troops to Afghanistan until there is a 'true partner' to work with in Kabul. An expert familiar with the U.S. administration's thinking said there was no stomach for an election run-off after the "organisational headaches and risks to American troops" experienced in the August 20 ballot, and stated: "There is a clear preference for a deal." Karzai campaign spokesman Wahid Omar stated: "''I don't think we can make any judgment based on the figures announced today." The New York Times'' reported that based on its analysis using preliminary data from the ECC findings, 874,000, or 28%, of Karzai's 3,093,000 votes were ordered invalidated by the sample-based fraud audit, as were 185,000, or 18%, of Abdullah's votes. The ECC also completely discarded 210 ballot boxes because of fraud, reducing Karzai's total by 41,000 votes and Abdullah's by 10,807 votes. The ECC findings resulted in pushing Karzai's final vote total from 54% down to around 48–49%, and raising Abdullah's vote total from 28% up to 31%. According to an article by The Times, overall, "some 1.26 million recorded votes were excluded from an election that cost the international community more than $300 million." The New York Times wrote, "fraud was so pervasive that nearly a quarter of all votes were thrown out.". However, according to The Times, one of Karzai's senior cabinet ministers, Ismail Khan, who had met with Karzai, said he had been told that a formal challenge will be issued: "He said he will complain against the ECC decision, and demand an investigation into why they cut his votes." Karzai had initially indicated that he might reject the Western-dominated ECC's findings. According to The New York Times, Karzai's capitulation came after "all-out push" by U.S. officials and their European allies. In a meeting hastily arranged after the release of the ECC ruling the previous day, U.S. Senator Kerry and the U.S. ambassador Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry were at the presidential palace in Kabul. Karzai initially hesitated but ended up agreeing to accept the findings during the course of the two-hour meeting. A senior Western official was quoted in an article by The Times as saying: "''No one wants a second round. It'll be expensive, bloody, and probably fraudulent.''" According to The Times, the certified results after the audit findings had left Karzai with 49.67% of the vote, just 0.33% below the 50% threshold to have avoided the run-off. unloading election ballots at U.S. Forward Operating Base Orgun-E on August 16, 2009. ==November 7 run-off election==

On October 23, election authorities, with UN assistance, began delivering ballots for the November 7 run-off. UN planes flew ballots and voting kits to provincial capitals from where they would be delivered to thousands of polling stations by helicopter, truck, women and donkey. Because of insecurity and fraud concerns, 7,000 polling stations – nearly 30% of the 24,000 polling stations that had been set up for the August 20 vote – were cut for the run-off vote. According to Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment and an expert on Afghanistan and South Asia: "This time around, the weather will be worse, and the plain fact is, most Afghans don’t like their options enough to vote." The run-off campaign period formally opened on October 24. Abdullah's campaign called for the dismissal of the three top officials of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), accusing them of having allowed widespread fraud in the first round of the election. Both run-off candidates were reported to be frantically wooing Ramazan Bashardost, the presidential candidate that had placed third in the August 20 first round vote. Karzai rejected the call by Abdullah, stating "the changes would not be helpful to the elections and the country". Abdullah also said the Afghan people should not accept results of an election from the current election commission, and stated that Karzai's government had not been legitimate since its mandate expired in May 2009. Afghanistan was thrown into a crisis after the withdrawal of Abdullah, which in effect cleared the way for Karzai to retain power despite the accusations of fraud. A weakened Karzai administration, shorn of electoral legitimacy, would represent a major blow to the Western allies who considered to send more troops to fight the Taliban. Run-off cancelled and winner declared The next day, on November 2, officials from the Independent Election Commission announced the cancellation of the November 7 run-off and declared Hamid Karzai the winner by default. He stated: "A government that is appointed by an illegitimate commission, a commission that has tainted its own legitimacy, cannot bring the rule of law to the country, it cannot fight the corruption." NDI data browser On December 17, 2009, the National Democratic Institute opened up an Afghanistan election data browser to the public. This tool allows users to browse the raw vote count from the 2009 presidential election on a national view and quickly study details on lower (provincial, district, and even polling center) levels. ==Perceived U.S. interference==

The United States is widely seen to have an enormous stake riding on the outcome of the election in Afghanistan. While U.S. officials have taken great pains to repeatedly assert neutrality, there are many perceptions and allegations of U.S. interference and manipulation in Afghanistan. Many in Afghanistan perceive the U.S. to have favoured Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah over Hamid Karzai. Others have made the same contention. Some support for Bashardost's allegation may be seen in the U.S.-funded pre-election polls, one conducted by what Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, described as "an outfit called Glevum Associates, which appears from its website to be a military contractor engaged in producing psychological operations data as part of a U.S. Army counterinsurgency program, the Human Terrain System," and the other by the International Republican Institute, a "pro-democracy group affiliated with the Republican Party and financed by the American government." In their May 3–16, 2009 poll, the International Republican Institute found that Bashardost placed higher than Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani in favorability amongst Afghans, and that Bashardost and Ghani both came in at the very same level of support, 3%, when Afghans were asked who they would vote for president in an open-ended question. Yet their July 16–26 survey asked a series of questions that quite specifically included Ghani, but left Bashardost out for some reason: Ashraf Ghani has widely been characterized as the U.S. favourite for appointment to that position. (Another mention was Zalmay Khalilzad.) Ghani has had discussions with U.S. officials, including both the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, and has denied turning down the job offer. He told reporters a few days before the election: "''I've been approached repeatedly; the offer is on the table. I have not accepted it.''" The U.S. special envoy also met with Karzai's rival, Abdullah Abdullah, after the election. The discussion between Holbrooke and Karzai was said to have been noticeably briefer than Holbrooke's meeting with Abdullah. Reacting to reports that the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan wanted the vote to go to a second round for the sake of credibility, the IEC said the result is an Afghan issue: The U.S., European, and NATO leaders also declared in their Paris meeting that their Western military troops were staying in Afghanistan. In an interview with Le Figaro released on September 7, 2009, Hamid Karzai accused the United States of trying to undermine him in order to make him more malleable. On September 13, 2009, the Sunday Telegraph reported that a "stormy meeting" between U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, former U.S. general Karl Eikenberry, and President Karzai had occurred the previous week. "Don't declare victory," warned the ambassador, on the instructions of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Telegraph reported that the Afghan president had refused to meet American officials since then. On September 15, 2009, the top U.S. diplomat to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), Peter Galbraith, was reportedly ordered out of the country by the head of the mission, U.N. Special Representative to Afghanistan Kai Eide, following a heated disagreement over the American diplomat's demands for a wholesale recount that would virtually ensure a run-off. According to diplomatic sources, Galbraith – a close friend of the U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke – wanted the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to annul results from 1,000 of the nationwide total of about 6,500 polling centres and to recount results from another 5,000. Eide, on the other hand had been seeking only a recount of some 1,000 polling centres. UN officials suggested that Mr. Galbraith's position was representative of the U.S. stance, while Mr. Eide's echoed those of the European missions in Kabul. According to The Times, the IEC were preparing on September 8 to announce results for the last 15% of ballots, mostly from the controversial areas of the south and Badghis province in the north that were expected to return big majorities for Karzai, when Galbraith stepped in and forced them not to announce those results. In October 2009, numerous news articles, such as one by The New York Times and anotherby the Associated Press, described the extraordinary American efforts, in concert with allies, over multiple days to pressure Hamid Karzai into acceding to run-off vote. On October 20, caving in to the relentless U.S. arm-twisting, he reluctantly acquiesced. U.S. efforts to force a power-sharing deal On September 13, 2009, the Sunday Telegraph reported that American officials were making frantic efforts to force President Hamid Karzai into a power-sharing deal against his wishes, stating that "US officials have made little secret of their wish to see his wings clipped". In what one official in Kabul described as "turmoil" behind the scenes, Western diplomats were attempting to convert the election crisis into an opportunity for their purposes by forcing Karzai to share power in government with Dr. Abdullah Abdullah and "reformist ministers", and accept a diminished role for the presidency. On October 15, 2009, Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under George W. Bush, arrived in Kabul from Washington D.C. A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said Khalilzad was there as a "private citizen" and that he was not representing the United States government. Earlier in the year Khalilzad was widely discussed as an American favorite to assume a powerful, unelected "CEO" position that U.S. officials hoped to create inside the Afghan government. A Western official said Khalilzad had come on the invitation of Mr. Karzai, but a spokesman for Karzai's campaign denied that. In an appearance on Afghan television, Khalilzad indicated that he had come to help Afghans during a difficult election process, but an official in Mr. Abdullah's campaign said they did not want his assistance, saying "We do not need any broker." On October 17, 2009, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, which had widely been expected to release its findings from the statistics-based audit, delayed the announcement again as U.S. and ally envoys pressured Karzai and Abdullah to state their acceptance of the findings before the ECC announcement and to work out a power-sharing deal. A senior American official made the point of stating that Karzai and Abdullah together won more than 70% of the votes in the first round, ensuring the credibility of a government in which they shared power. A Karzai spokesman indicated that both foreign and Afghan officials were proffering formulas for power sharing, but that Karzai had rejected them and would not discuss power sharing until after a winner is declared. Abdullah also reiterated that he would consider negotiating after the results were announced. On October 20, 2009, after Karzai caved in to intense U.S. and ally pressure that a senior U.S. administration official described as a "full court press", and acceded to a run-off, diplomats said the efforts to get the two men to join forces would now intensify. Accusations of foreign interference from within the ECC On October 12, 2009, one of the two Afghan members of the Western-dominated Electoral Complaints Commission resigned over "foreign interference". Barakzai's resignation left the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) with only one Afghan member and three officials from countries with foreign military troops in Afghanistan. The ECC is led by one of the three foreign officials, chairman Grant Kippen. Karzai said that the resignation Barakzai "cast serious doubt" on the work of the commission. Mustafa Barakzai, a Supreme Court Judge who was one of two Afghans on the commission, resigned on Monday claiming foreigners were "interfering" in its work. Supporters of Abdullah claimed that Karzai was somehow behind Barakzai's sudden resignation. ==Accusations of a United Nations cover-up==

U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, fired from his UN post by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on September 30, 2009, after accusing his former boss, UN special envoy Kai Eide, of helping cover up electoral fraud and being biased in favor of Hamid Karzai, further accused the UN of fabricating the reason for his dismissal and of helping to cover up massive electoral fraud committed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. In his statements on October 4, 2009, the American diplomat characterized the Afghan election as a "train wreck", and claimed: "''As many as 30% of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates.''" Galbraith told the Washington Post that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's final instruction before firing him was: "Do not talk". On October 11, 2009, Kai Eide referred to Galbraith's allegations as "personal attacks" against his integrity, adding they have "affected the whole election process." ==See also==