Electoral Observers Are Concerned About “Imaginary Voters”

The Independent Elections Commission (IEC) say that considering the previous and current list of voters over 9 million voters will go for the upcoming presidential election.

However, the electoral observers say that at least five million imaginary voters existed in the previous list of voters.

“There were expectations that the list of voters will be reassessed. I believe that five million imaginary voters exist in the previous list of voters. They want to add to the number of imaginary voters instead of excluding the current ones from the list,” said Fazl Ahmad Manawi, a former IEC official.

There are also concerns about the existence of imaginary voters in the ongoing voters’ registration process, the electoral observers add.

Further, they say that IEC will hold the upcoming presidential election by having the imaginary voters in the list without reevaluating the previous list of voters.

“We are concerned that the Elections Commission will announce an imaginary statistics of the voters,” said Yousof Rashid, Chief of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA).

Meanwhile, IEC says that it will prevent the frauds by using the biometric devices in the upcoming election.

“Each polling station has 400 voters while this number was 600 in the previous elections. No vote without the voter’s biometric identity will not be counted,” said Habib ul Rahman Nang, the Chief of IEC Secretariat.

This comes as most of the presidential candidates, electoral observers, and people are not satisfied with the IEC’s actions and they are concerned about the existence of likely frauds in the presidential election.