Will electoral Fraud undermine Afghanistan’s new President?

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/04/undermine-afghanistans-president.html

Will electoral Fraud undermine Afghanistan’s new President?
By Juan Cole | Apr. 5, 2014
(By Djeyhoun Ostowar)

War-torn Afghanistan does not possess a civil registry. It therefore lacks reliable statistics. Given widespread corruption, the absence of an identification system and the high security risk of voting, is mass-election fraud a necessary and acceptable price for peace?

On April 5, the Afghan people will vote in the country’s presidential elections, only the third in Afghanistan’s history. In addition to the important questions of who is likely to win the race and what various outcomes will mean for the future of the country, these elections represent something else – another attempt at organizing free and fair elections in a weak, war-torn state.

Difficulties abound, but based on experiences with the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan, the challenges that the country has to face to ensure success lie in three intimately intertwined and basic issues: voting management, country-wide participation and the perception of elections.

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When the international community and the post-Taliban interim Afghan government first took up the task of holding general elections in Afghanistan in 2004-2005, one major problem was immediately apparent, namely that in this conflict/post-conflict state, which lacks an effective civil registry, the task of organizing and monitoring voting would be extremely difficult. Somehow the challenge of not knowing how many eligible voters there were per district or town, let alone being able to verify the identity of voters (due to a poor ID card/passport system), had to be circumvented. A decision was made to apply ad hoc solutions such as voter registration cards and indelible ink (the latter was used to mark fingertips of voters in order to prevent multiple voting).