Historic Vote Passes Off Quietly

Women voting in Charikar, Parwan province. Picture by Jean MacKenzie.

Afghans voted in their first democratic parliamentary elections in three decades, defying threats of violence to tackle the sometimes daunting task of picking out their chosen candidate amid an unfamiliar and complex voting process.

Small queues began forming shortly before polls were scheduled to open at six in the morning on September 18. At many of the country's 26,000 polling stations, officials were still setting up ballot boxes and voting booths, and putting out the bottles of indelible purple ink used to mark each voter’s thumb to prevent fraud.

An estimated 12.5 million Afghans aged 18 and over were eligible to vote in a double election – for the lower house of parliament or Wolesi Jirga, and for the country's 34 provincial councils. Nearly 6,000 candidates are seeking election as members of parliament or as councillors.

Preliminary results will not be known until around October 10, with final results expected on October 22.

IWPR reporters saw several polling stations in Kabul which did not open until after 7 am, over an hour late, with radio and television channels reporting similar delays in other parts of the country.

Throughout the day, apart from a few grumbles, the atmosphere in Kabul appeared relaxed. Reaction among voters to the nearly 400 parliamentary candidates, who were standing for the 33 Wolesi Jirga seats earmarked for Kabul province, ranged from enthusiasm to despair.

"After years of war, we have the right to vote for democracy," said 21-year-old Khazem, an early arrival who was critical of the delayed opening of polls, saying, "The trouble is, there's no management here."

One voter complained that many of the candidates on the ballot were the same warlords and low-ranking militia commanders who were responsible for years of civil war that left Kabul in ruins.

Hasrat, 52, who had arrived early at a polling station in Kabul’s 15th district, needed a cane to support him as he waited to cast his ballot.

Asked who he would pick, he said, "Out of the bad, the worse and the even worse, I will vote for the bad one, because in the present situation, the bad one's better than the rest."

Mohammad Akbar, 45, arrived at a polling station set up at the Zarghona Girls' High School in central Kabul's Qala-e-Fatullah district in an ingenious wheelchair made out of bicycle parts.

"I am very keen to vote. I was here in this [polling] centre for the presidential election and I wanted to come to the same one, because the man I voted for last year [President Hamed Karzai] won and I want my candidate to win this time," he said, after wheeling himself into the tree-lined courtyard.

"As you can see, I'm disabled in both legs so I came early to avoid the rush and the crowds," he said. The steps up to the 15 classrooms reserved for men to vote meant he could not use his wheelchair, so he shuffled in on hands and knees

At the back of the school, near the eight voting rooms for women, chaotic heaps of desks testified to the rushed transformation of classrooms into voting areas.

Once the polls opened, it was evident that the process was considerably more cumbersome than had been anticipated.

Officials from the Joint Electoral Management Body, JEMB, had estimated that the procedure would take no more than two to three minutes per person. But IWPR timed a woman taking exactly 20 minutes to complete the process of checks, examine the complex ballot papers, and finally cast her vote.

At a polling station in north Kabul, 23-year-old Sarfraaz said after casting his ballot, "Finding the candidate I wanted was very hard. There was a terribly long list, and I can't read. I spent five minutes going through the symbols and photos to look for my candidate, but they were very small."

Radios blared out patriotic music throughout the day, perhaps in an attempt to encourage people to vote. However, the impact of this was unclear.

With communications difficult in parts of this mountainous country, it was not immediately possible to assess overall voter participation. However, an IWPR reporter who covered the 2004 presidential election, where turnout was put at 70 per cent, said there appeared to be many fewer voting on this Sunday.

At a mid-afternoon news conference, chief electoral officer Peter Erben described the poll as peaceful and said that in Herat, Ghazni and Kunduz, the numbers of women voters equalled those of men.

Erben said voting started slowly in many districts but picked up later. He could not give an exact turnout figure but warned against making comparisons with the presidential poll, saying that any lack of voters at polling centres could be attributed to the fact that there were 30 per cent more places to vote than last October.

He added that only 15 polling stations had remained closed because of security problems, and the voters affected by this had opportunities to use other sites.

In the eastern province of Kunar, armed men tried to disrupt voting at several centres. They exchanged fire with police before the army arrived and the gunmen fled. There were no casualties and the polling stations quickly reopened, said Erben.

Armed troops checked all vehicles on roads leading into Kabul, but in the city itself, there was no sign of the tight controls evident at last October's presidential election, when there was an inner ring of police and an outer cordon of troops around each polling station.

IWPR's visits to a number of Kabul polling stations revealed only a handful of armed police guarding each, with a unarmed police - one man and one woman - searching voters as they entered before directing them to segregated voting areas.

United States and Afghan officials had warned that the Taleban would seek to disrupt the elections, although Lutfullah Hakimi, a spokesman for the group, said that polling stations would not be attacked, so as to avoid harming innocent people.

There were reports of sporadic attacks and violence around the country.

Two rockets hit a compound of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, at 7.40 am, setting an office ablaze. There were conflicting reports on casualties. Radio and television reports said one person was wounded, while officials on the spot told IWPR that no one was hurt. It was not clear whether the rockets had been aimed at a nearby girls' school being used as a polling station in the Bagrami district of east Kabul.

One hour before voting began, security forces in Baghlan province north of Kabul found three kilograms of primed explosives linked to a remote control device planted at the Khost-e-Fering high school, also being used as a polling centre.

And late on September 17, unidentified attackers threw a grenade into the home of a candidate in Jalalabad, the provincial capital of Nangarhar province, wounding five people.

In the run-up to the elections, at least six candidates and five election workers have been killed. Officials have blamed most of the killings on the Taleban, who have accepted responsibility for some of them.

The death of candidates, and the elimination of some others by the Election Complaints Commission, ECC, have added to the confusion at polling stations.

In its September 17 "Notice to Voters", only hours before voting was to begin, JEMB issued a list of six candidates who had died and 29 disqualified since July 12.

"While their names remain on the ballot papers, these candidates are no longer standing … and votes cast for these candidates will be invalid," the JEMB statement said. "Voters are being informed through public service announcements on radio of which candidates are no longer eligible for election."

However, not everyone will have been listening to the radio, and at polling stations visited by IWPR reporters, there was no sign of any list alerting those voters who could read that some candidates were out of the race.

In Parwan, a province just north of Kabul, anyone who has heard that Samia Sadat, one of the most popular candidates in the region, has been disqualified by the ECC, will still have got it wrong – the JEMB announced at the eleventh hour that she had been reinstated.