Another Afghan Election Tainted By Corruption

Following a pattern that started with last year’s Presidential election, it now looks like the recent Parliamentary elections in Afghanistan were pretty much corrupt:

Afghanistan has released full preliminary results from last month’s parliamentary election, throwing out more than 20 percent of ballots because of fraud.

Election commission chairman Fazel Ahmad Manawi says about 1.3 million votes were disqualified out of 5.6 million. That means about 23 percent of ballots were discarded because of ballot-box stuffing or re-jiggered totals.

Election officials called the vote a success because they were able to catch the fraud, but the number of fraudulent ballots also indicates that cheating was pervasive in a vote that many hoped would show the government’s commitment to reform.

Of course, that assumes that the only corrupt ballots were the 1.7 million they caught, rather than those merely being examples of incompetent corruption.

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.