By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer KABUL, Afghanistan - A U.N. helicopter hauling ballots from remote villages in northeastern Afghanistan (news - web sites) crash-landed in a snowy field Tuesday. Nobody was injured and no ballots were lost, but officials said the accident would delay vote counting from rugged Badakhshan province. The crash was the latest snag holding up the massive task of recovering and tabulating ballots from Afghanistan's first presidential election Saturday. The tally was to begin Wednesday at the earliest, and final results were not expected until late October. The helicopter went down at high altitude in an area known as the Wakhan corridor, which has few roads, said David Avery, chief of operations for the Joint Electoral Management Body. "We don't think we'll be able to recover the helicopter," he said. Badakhshan province borders China, Tajikistan and Pakistan. Chances for a conclusive result improved Monday after interim President Hamid Karzai's main challenger, ethnic Tajik candidate Yunus Qanooni, backed away from a boycott of the vote, indicating he'd accept an independent commission to investigate vote-fraud allegations. Karzai is the clear favorite to win, but his ability to consolidate his rule would be undermined if the opposition refuses to acknowledge the vote results. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the first foreign leader to visit since the election, all but declared Karzai the winner on Monday. In addition, an exit poll conducted by an American group closely tied to the Republican Party projected Karzai would win with the outright majority needed to avoid a second round. The survey by the International Republican Institute said Karzai would finish ahead of Qanooni by an overwhelming 43 percentage points. The group did not release a full breakdown of its data. Qanooni said he would accept an investigation by an independent panel of election experts into opposition complaints that the supposedly indelible ink used to mark voters' thumbs in some polling stations could be rubbed off, allowing some to vote more than once. "I don't want to be against the election and I appreciate the good will of the people of Afghanistan," Qanooni said. "I want to prove to the people of Afghanistan that the national interest is my highest interest." He said he made his decision after a meeting with U.N. representative Jean Arnault and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. The announcement followed similar statements Sunday by Massooda Jalal, the only female presidential hopeful and ethnic Hazara candidate Mohammed Mohaqeq. There were indications another rival, ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, might be considering backing down as well. Dostum traveled to Kabul Tuesday from his home in the north, and his spokesman said he was considering accepting a compromise. Electoral officials say the candidates have until Tuesday afternoon to submit formal protests, and the officials were waiting to receive them before they began the count. Election organizers agreed to set up the panel Sunday in hopes it would end the crisis that emerged when all 15 opposition candidates declared the boycott while voting was under way Saturday. The election has been hailed as a success by U.N. officials, Bush and other world leaders. International electoral observers have said the attempt to nullify the vote was unjustified. Schroeder said the poll "was a great step toward democracy and stability" and predicted a Karzai win. "It is my opinion that he will do it, and in the first round," he said. A high voter turnout in Afghanistan, which never before has tasted democracy, and a failure of Taliban rebels to launch a massive attack have also been held up as proof of success. In the latest in a series of minor attacks, five rockets slammed into Kabul not far from the U.S. Embassy on Monday, killing a 16-year-old Afghan and damaging a house, officials and witnesses said.Link
15 Afghan Candidates to File Vote Complaints With Panel By CARLOTTA GALL Published: October 13, 2004 KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 12 - Fifteen of the 17 candidates who ran against the interim president, Hamid Karzai, in Afghanistan's first presidential election met here on Tuesday to prepare official complaints of multiple voting, ballot box stuffing and other irregularities. The complaints will be investigated by a commission set up by the United Nations after the 15 candidates called for a suspension of the election on Saturday and accused the United Nations and Afghan Joint Election Management Board of bias toward Mr. Karzai. The candidates agreed to abide by the panel's findings. A spokesman for Mr. Karzai's campaign, Hamid Elmi, said Mr. Karzai's campaign office was also submitting complaints involving other candidates' supporters, but he did not specify what. The large number of complaints may slow down a counting process already expected to take at least two weeks. The candidates' main complaint focused on the failure of a system to prevent multiple voting, in which voters' hands were marked with what was supposed to be indelible ink but which often washed off easily. Critics said the problem had opened the election to widespread fraud. "It was systematic rigging," said Dr. Yassa, an aide to one candidate, Muhammad Mohaqeq, an ethnic Hazara and a Shiite Muslim. "There are 15 candidates against Karzai and every one has dozens of complaints," said Abdul Bashir Bezhan, a party deputy to another candidate, Latif Pedram. He said there were numerous accounts of multiple voting, with some reports of people who had voted up to 15 times, and who were ready to admit it and show their multiple cards. Other complaints involved ballot-box fraud. Dr. Yassa said two boxes from a Hazara district of Kabul had been found to be missing ballots - one lacked 300 and one 200 - at the counting center during the first checking procedure. He said he suspected foul play because the district was known for its support for Mr. Mohaqeq and the missing ballots would have almost certainly been in his favor. Another candidate, Homayoun Shah Assefi, a former Afghan diplomat, told of a case he learned of on Saturday from a police official in Ghazni, some 100 miles south of Kabul, in which the manager of a polling station took home two ballot boxes and returned them on election morning stuffed with ballots. The police official, he said, gave the names of those involved and also had the numbers of the boxes. The story did not end there: the manager was briefly detained by the local police but was released after saying the falsified ballots had been filled out in favor of Mr. Karzai, Mr. Assefi said, and the boxes were put in with the legitimate boxes. "I don't know if such an infamous case has occurred in other places at this stage, but on that day I received complaints of fraud and cheating from Kandahar and Nangarhar as well," Mr. Assefi said. In Spinbaldak, in southern Afghanistan, poll officers were ordered by their supervisor to fill out 700 ballots in favor of Mr. Karzai, according to an election official interviewed in Kandahar. Two men, tribal elders from a nearby refugee camp, arrived with 700 registration cards and said they wanted to vote for the entire camp, said the election official, who asked to remain anonymous. The 700 cards were divided among the poll officers in five adjoining rooms. A poll official said he was handed 100 cards and ordered to punch each of them with a hole-puncher, while his colleague was told to mark ballots for Mr. Karzai. The election official said the poll official had objected but had been told by his supervisor, "You should not worry, you should just do your work." Another poll official described working in a mountainous area in southern Afghanistan and being ordered by tribal chiefs to fill out 60 to 70 extra ballots for absentee voters, many of them women. The man said his supervisor had told him to comply. "It was in the middle of the desert," he said. "The supervisor said we are so far from anywhere, please just do it. It does not matter." All the extra ballots were filled out for Mr. Karzai, he said. link
