New Technology to Be Used in Upcoming Elections

The chairman of Independent Election Commission (IEC) Secretariat says new technology will be used in upcoming parliamentary and provincial council elections.

 The electoral observing and monitoring institutions say holding the upcoming elections depend to key figures in the government.

“The main problem is the government. If the senior authorities want to use an electronic method the process will be transparent,” said Jan Dad Spin Ghar, Afghanistan election watchdog said.

The holding process of forthcoming elections faces two main challenges; first, providing the security of ballot boxes and second, providing 210 million dollars for holding the elections.

“We have security problems. We had international forces and backups in the previous years but we do not have now,” said Yousuf Rashid, CEO of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan.

At the moment Afghanistan has no voter list system. Although there are databases with information gathered during several rounds of ‘voter registration’ ahead of previous elections, they are not in any usable way linked to the voter cards that have been distributed, nor do they link voters to polling centres.