Around 22,445 result sheets and a complete data of voters from 2,800 biometric devices have been transferred to the IEC main server in Kabul so far, officials said on Wednesday.

Despite of Taliban’s repeated threats, Afghan presidential election took place on September 28 across the country.

However, the process of transferring data from biometric devices to the main server is very slow, and officials feared that it would be impossible to announce the preliminary result as scheduled for Oct. 19.

The election commission is supposed to transfer the data of 26,568 biometric devices including voter’s information, picture, Tazkera, and fingerprint, into the main database.

But the process seems to be very slow due to technical and internet issues.

“Voter’s information from each polling station is supposed to be transferred into the commission’s main server and complete a deduplication process but due to a technical problem, the process is not moving forward normally,” said Nasir Nasiri, an observer of TEFA, a Kabul-based election monitoring organization.

Apparently, the technical and internet problems have concerned officials as well.

“If the transferring process of data remains slow like the last couple of days, we may not be able to announce the preliminary results as scheduled,” Mohammad Hanif Danishyar, a member of the IEC told Ariana News.

In addition, the IEC has received the physical data packages from 32 provinces of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces in its National Tally Center where around 22,451 result sheets have been scanned and entered into the system.

In contrary, Aurangzeb, a senior member of the commission who was speaking during a press conference, said that IEC will announce the preliminary results on Oct. 19.

“When the manual and digital data centers finalized their tasks and all data transferred to these data centers, the biometric and non-biometric data will be cross-checked in a short period of time and we will implement the deduplication process,” he added.

Meanwhile, the US Embassy in Kabul, in a tweet, called on “everyone to respect the time required” for the election management bodies to finish processing the votes, adding it is “better to be right than fast.”