Impatient Afghan candidates are counting their own votes --- KABUL — In this rugged country where ballots are counted by hand and election results are viewed with suspicion, impatient presidential candidates are not willing to wait for official numbers and have started counting votes themselves. --- Since Saturday’s presidential election, tens of thousands of volunteers for the candidates have been visiting polling stations across the country to call in results that have been taped on the walls of mosques and schools. The team of former finance minister Ashraf Ghani has created a slick Web site with pie charts and bar graphs that show partial returns as they come in, three weeks ahead of the expected announcement of the winner. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his Web site is projecting that he will be the victor (by a margin of 57 percent, with a quarter of the ballots counted). --- The days after the vote have transformed campaign offices into command centers where candidates’ staffs are calling around the country collecting photos and videos and complaints about alleged fraud, calculating vote totals and positioning themselves for a possible runoff election if no candidate passes the 50 percent threshold. --- The other main activity among the candidates’ teams is collecting allegations of voting fraud or coercion that might help tip the scales in a close race. The staffs are manning call centers and collecting complaints from around the country and filing them with election officials. At an office in Kabul run by a political party supporting Ghani, young men made calls to the provinces, watched videos on their laptops of alleged fraud and wrote up complaints to be submitted for review. - More, Joshua Partlow, Washingtonpost, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/impatient-afghan-candidates-are-counting-their-own-votes/2014/04/07/82945665-dc9a-4719-9f9f-9e626724f970_story.html