Saturday, July 12, 2014

In Election Deal, Afghans to Audit Every Vote Cast --- KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan will conduct an audit of the entire eight million votes cast in the recent presidential election, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Saturday, a deal he brokered to resolve a tense power struggle between the top two presidential candidates over allegations of widespread vote fraud. -- The audit, which will begin immediately, will be supervised by international monitors and its results will be binding, according to the agreement announced by Mr. Kerry and endorsed by the rival candidates at a news conference in Kabul, the capital. “Every single ballot that was cast will be audited,” he said. The breakthrough came on the second day of a visit that Mr. Kerry hastily arranged to try to prevent Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power from collapsing. Both candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, had said the election was marred by fraud, but both had also claimed victory. -- Tensions rose Tuesday when Mr. Abdullah threatened to form his own government, raising the possibility of an ethnically and regionally divided Afghanistan just as American troops prepare to complete their withdrawal. -- Mr. Kerry made the announcement flanked by Mr. Abdullah, a former foreign minister, and Mr. Ghani, a former finance minister, after intense negotiations involving shuttling between the two sides and meetings with President Hamid Karzai. -- The audit will take several weeks, and Mr. Kerry said he and the candidates would ask Mr. Karzai to postpone the inauguration, now scheduled for Aug. 2. The audit will begin within 24 hours, Mr. Kerry said. Ballot boxes will be flown into the capital by the NATO-led military coalition in Afghanistan, and United Nations and other international observers will watch the entire process. -- “This is unquestionably a tense and difficult moment,” Mr. Kerry said, “but I am very pleased that the two candidates who stand here with me today and President Karzai have stepped up and shown a significant commitment to compromise.” --- Jan Kubis, the United Nations special representative in Afghanistan, called on other nations to send extra observers to assist with the audit as soon as possible. -- The two candidates spent the day inside the United States Embassy building, holding separate meetings with Mr. Kerry, according to campaign officials. Mr. Kerry then traveled to the presidential palace to talk to Mr. Karzai. Talks had continued into the early evening without food or drink because of Ramadan, during which Muslims fast during the day. -- Discussions concerned how to determine how many ballots should be re-examined for fraud and how to ensure that the audit was impartial. Both sides had wrangled over the technical details, in particular the threshold for selecting which ballots should be reviewed. -- By midday, Mahmoud Saikal, an adviser to Mr. Abdullah, said that “preliminary progress” had been made and that the campaign was waiting to see if the proposals would be accepted by the other side. But a spokesman for Mr. Ghani, Abdullah Poyan, said the discussions remained “complicated.” -- Mr. Kerry had to seek not only agreement by the two candidates, but also acceptance by Mr. Karzai, who will step down after 13 years in power and has by all accounts remained a powerful presence behind the scenes. --- In the first round of voting on April 5, Mr. Abdullah emerged the winner against 11 other candidates, with 45 percent of the vote to Mr. Ghani’s 31 percent. Because neither won more than 50 percent of the vote, a required runoff between the two was held on June 14. Preliminary results from the runoff show Mr. Ghani leaping ahead with 56 percent of the vote, and Mr. Abdullah with 44 percent. The turnout also increased by more than a million voters in the runoff, to eight million. -- More, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/world/asia/kerry-in-afghanistan-seeks-deal-to-ease-vote-crisis-.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

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