theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
Afghan Turnout Is High as Voters Defy the Taliban
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/asia/afghanistan-voting.html?hp&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/asia/afghanistan-voting.html?hp&_r=0
Defying a campaign of Taliban violence that unleashed 39 suicide bombers in the two months before Election Day, Afghan voters on Saturday turned out in such numbers to choose a new president and provincial councils that polling hours were extended nationwide, in a triumph of determination over intimidation.
Militants failed to mount a single major attack anywhere in Afghanistan by the time polls closed, and voters lined up despite heavy rain and cold in the capital and elsewhere.
“Whenever there has been a new king or president, it has been accompanied by death and violence,” said Abdul Wakil Amiri, a government official who turned out early to vote at a Kabul mosque. “For the first time, we are experiencing democracy.”
After 12 years with President Hamid Karzai in power, and decades of upheaval, coup and war, Afghans on Saturday were for the first time voting on a relatively open field of candidates.
Election officials said that by midday more than three and a half million voters had turned out — already approaching the total for the 2009 vote. The election commission chairman, Mohammad Yusuf Nuristani, said the total could reach seven million.
One Afghan Woman’s Voice
Despite Taliban threats, Afghans turned out across the country Saturday to vote for a new president. Shukria Barakzai, one of the few female members of the Afghan Parliament, prepared to vote.
But even as they celebrated the outpouring of votes, many acknowledged the long process looming ahead, with the potential for problems all along the way.
International observers, many of whom had fled Afghanistan after a wave of attacks on foreigners during the campaign, cautioned that how those votes were tallied and reported would bear close watching.
It is likely to take at least a week before even incomplete official results are announced, and weeks more to adjudicate Election Day complaints. Some of the candidates were already filing fraud complaints on Saturday.
With eight candidates in the race, the five minor candidates’ shares of the vote made it even more difficult for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that would allow an outright victory. A runoff vote is unlikely to take place until the end of May at the earliest.
The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai’s government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former foreign minister.
A shortage of ballots at polling places, widespread across the country by midday Saturday, left with increasingly frustrated voters waiting for hours. Some were rewarded, as officials managed to rush in new ballots to meet the demand. Others waited in vain.
More worrisome, the threat of violence in many rural areas had forced election authorities to close nearly 1,000 out of a planned-for 7,500 polling places, raising fears that a big chunk of the electorate would remain disenfranchised — although in at least some of those areas voters were able to seek more secure voting places.
But when it came to attacks on election day, the Taliban’s threats seemed to be greatly overstated. Only one suicide bombing attempt could be confirmed — in Khost — and the bomber managed to kill only himself when the police stopped him outside a polling place.
In three scattered attacks on polling places, four voters were reported killed. Two rockets fired randomly into the city of Jalalabad wounded three civilians, none of them even voting age. One border policeman, in southern Kandahar Province, and another policeman in remote western Farah province were confirmed killed in Taliban attacks. There were reports that up to eight Afghan Local Police members had been killed in northern Kunduz Province, though the authorities said Saturday evening that they were false.
Bad as all that was, it was a lower casualty toll than a normal day in Afghanistan, let alone an election on which both the insurgents and the government had staked their credibility. Officials of the International Security Assistance Force said they had counted only 100 attacks on election day nationwide, compared with 500 in the last presidential elections, in 2009.
In preparation for the election, the Afghan government mobilized its entire military and police forces, some 350,000 in all, backed up by 53,000 NATO coalition troops — although the Americans and their allies stayed out of it, leaving Afghans for the first time entirely in charge of securing their own election.
“Voting on this day will be a slap to the faces of the terrorists,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, the acting head of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence agency.
Sensitive to concerns about potential fraud — more than a million ballots were thrown out in the 2009 presidential vote and then again in the 2010 parliamentary elections — the police were quick to report their efforts to crack down on Saturday.
Among those arrested were four people in Khost who were caught with 1,067 voter registration cards. Several people, including an election official, were caught trying to stuff ballot boxes in Wardak Province.
Election officials expressed confidence that redoubled safeguards, including computerized bar coding of ballots, ballot boxes and voter registration cards, as well as two kinds of indelible ink to mark voters’ fingers with (one invisible except under ultraviolet light, the other blue silver-nitrate), would help them detect other forms of fraud.
Early indications were cheering on many fronts.
“This has been the best and most incident-free election in Afghanistan’s modern history and it could set the precedence for a historic, peaceful transition of power in Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Fahim Sadeq, head of the Afghanistan National Participation Organization, an observer group.
