September 8, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — The United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the Afghan elections announced Tuesday that it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount even as election officials declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a majority of the vote.

With 91.6 percent of the polling stations counted, the officials said, Mr. Karzai had won 54.1 percent of the vote, and his main challenger, the former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 28.3 percent. The tally, if certified, would mean that Mr. Karzai would be declared the victor without the need for a runoff because he would won more than 50 percent of the vote.

But international election officials and observers immediately cast those figures in doubt. They said the tallies included hundreds of thousands of suspect votes that would have been excluded if Afghan election officials had correctly used safeguards built into the computerized counting system.

One Western official said Mr. Karzai would not have made the 50 per cent mark if the triggers built into the computer counting system were enforced as planned.

"He was below 50 per cent when you exclude the obviously fraudulent votes," the diplomat said of Mr. Karzai.

Afghan election officials had made a decision Sunday to enforce a number of algorithms that would catch irregularities where more than the expected number of voters were recorded, or where one candidate won an exceptional result.

But when it became clear that Mr. Karzai would not make the necessary 50 per cent, the diplomat said, the decision was reversed Monday, and the officials announced they had no legal authority to exclude ballots from the count.

Reports of egregious fraud have marred the Aug. 20 presidential election and raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the Afghan political process as Mr. Karzai seeks a second five-year term.

Mr. Abdullah and other opposition candidates have repeatedly accused the Karzai government of voting fraud. In a statement on Tuesday, the Electoral Complaints Commission, an Afghan and international panel in charge of certifying the final count, said it had found a "clear pattern" of fraud in the polling stations it investigated in the southern and eastern provinces of Kandahar, Paktika and Ghazni.

The ballot boxes, the commission said, were tainted in one of two ways: either they were stuffed with an "exceptionally high number of presidential votes" in relation to the number of ballots available, or they contained an "exceptionally high percentage of votes" cast for one candidate, or both. The statement did not say which candidate had benefited, but Mr. Karzai won large numbers of votes in those areas.

The complaints commission ordered a recount of all votes in polling stations where 600 or more votes had been cast — a level seen as suspiciously high. All stations where any one candidate received 95 percent or more of the votes cast will also be recounted. Stations where fewer than 100 votes were cast will be exempt from recounts.

The audits, which affect an unknown number of polling stations, will be conducted in the presence of international and Afghan observers, and ballots ruled to be fraudulent will be discarded, the commission said. The process is expected to take weeks.

About 5.7 million votes have been tallied so far, but at least 224,000 have been thrown out because the candidate had withdrawn or because of technical problems with the ballot, like a vote cast for not one but two presidential candidates.

The confirmation of significant fraud places the Obama administration in a difficult position as it seeks to shore up domestic and international support for the expanding Afghan war. American officials have said little publicly about how they will respond to the vote-rigging accusations, but some Western and Afghan officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said there was broad misconduct.

Those officials said this week that Afghans loyal to Mr. Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election. Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.

The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. "We are talking about orders of magnitude," a senior Western diplomat said. "This was fraud en masse."

In Mr. Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted, but the Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there. More than 2,300 complaints of electoral misconduct have been lodged with the commission.

The election uncertainty comes amid increasing violence in Afghanistan that has led to a record number of international troop deaths this year. On Tuesday, a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of NATO soldiers near the main gate of their air base in Kabul, a senior Afghan police official said, killing at least three civilians just three weeks after a similar attack.

A NATO spokesman said that while no international forces had been killed, some had been wounded. Six civilians, including one woman, were being treated for injuries at a local hospital, said Dr. Farid Raaid, a spokesman for the Public Health Ministry. The death toll was likely to rise, officials said.

The explosion occurred at 8:20 a.m. outside the entrance to the air facility operated by the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led coalition. Coalition flights operate from the base, located at the eastern end of Kabul’s main international airport.

In a phone call from an undisclosed location, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, claimed responsibility for the blast, and he said coalition troops had been the target.

Three weeks ago, Mr. Mujahid claimed responsibility for a similar attack outside NATO headquarters in Kabul. At the time, he warned that the Taliban would "continue this kind of operation in the future and we will accelerate our operations against the Afghan and foreign forces."

In that attack, a suicide car bomber struck just outside the NATO headquarters and the Ministry of Transportation, a block from the United States Embassy in Kabul. Seven people — all civilians — were killed, and 91 others were wounded.

Carlotta Gall reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.