President Hamid Karzai takes 100% of votes in opposition stronghold

Source: Times OnLine

In the southern Afghan district of Shorabak, the tribesmen gathered shortly before last month’s presidential election to discuss which candidate they would back. After a debate they chose to endorse Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s leading opponent.

The tribal leaders prepared to deliver a landslide for Abdullah – but it never happened. They claim Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and leader of the Kandahar provincial council, detained the local governor and closed all the district’s 46 polling sites on election day.

The ballot boxes were taken back to the district headquarters where, tribal leaders allege, they were stuffed with ballots by local policemen. A total of 23,900 ballots were finally sent off to Kabul, the capital – every one of them a vote for Karzai. (snip)

The sheer scale and audacity of the cheating, which includes supposedly “state-sponsored” ballot-stuffing, vote burning, intimidation and the closure of polling stations in antigovernment areas, has overwhelmed the country’s fledgling Electoral Complaints Commission. Its staff are battling with more than 2,600 reports of vote-rigging, including at least 650 deemed serious enough “materially” to influence the result.

Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6823431.ece

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Democracy is dead in Afghanistan ... It’s buried. I’m not even bothering to get my results any more because it’s completely rigged. - Fifth ranked Presidential candidate, Mirwais Yasini. Or is that fourth ranked? A debacle, by the looks of it.

yeah! :sarcasm:

just look at the awesome US track record of picking foreign pupp...leaders.

Time to stop nation building.

just ask the British.

Wow! Those "opposition" folks just luv them some Karzai!

and stupid too. ;)

American election tactics there.

Mission accomplished! Time to bring the troops home! Woo-hoo!

They actually have a reasonably representative system where the leaders of various communities get together in something more like a legislative body.

It would have been far more reasaonable to have such a body elect the national executive, sort of like a prime minister.

Even the founders of the US didn't attempt to have the unlettered and ignorant masses directly elect the President.

Direct, popular elections are particularly bad in a society that regards elections not as a biennial adjustment of relative power between two or more fairly similar parties, but instead as a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to permanently seize power for your own faction or ethnic or religious group.

More of less what you describe: "A reasonably representative system where the leaders of various communities get together in something more like a legislative body".

A golden oldie....


http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/09/florida_vote/

:eyes: