ALLEGATIONS OF FRAUD are clouding the general election in Afghanistan as tallying continues.

Al Jazeera, reporting from Kabul, said there were “all sorts of allegations of fraud coming from across the country. We’ve people who have been able to wash the ‘indelible’ ink off their fingers; we have voter registration cards - fake ones – which were definitely used, we are told, in some areas and we have been told of some polling stations where one candidate allowed only his supporters to go inside.”
3.6 million votes have been counted so far, but 11.4 million Aghans were eligible to vote. Fake voting cards had proliferated in the run-up to Saturday’s election, but the government says that electoral officials were trained to spot the fraudulent cards.

The Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (Fefa) said there were ”serious concerns about the quality of elections” after it deployed nearly 7,000 people nationwide to observe the vote.

“The women coming here have so many cards that don’t have the stamp and are not real cards but still they are voting,” Nazreen, a monitor for Fefa said. “There were almost no elections in Wardak,” said Ghulam Hassan, a local elder. “The votes were stolen right in front of our eyes.”

“The real issue is the scale of that [fraud] and does it affect the result. And does it affect the credibility of the election, not in our eyes but in the eyes of the Afghan people?” Mark Sedwill, Nato’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan,  said.