Very few people believed a presidential election would take place in Afghanistan. US-Taliban talks in Doha, growing insecurity and intensifying political divisions had created an uncertain environment in the war-ravaged country. On top of all that, the Afghan Taliban had declared an all-out war against the vote, threatening civilians, electoral staff and government forces with attacks during the polls.
But against all the odds, the
election took place on Saturday and in a relatively successful manner, at least considering the number of attacks carried out by the Taliban.
The insurgent group claimed to have launched 531 attacks, while the Interior Ministry said "the enemy" had
carried out 68 assaults. The official death toll on the election day was five security forces, although authorities have a record of suppressing casualty figures on such occasions, only to reveal the real numbers later.
In any case, the current numbers of casualties on the election day are lower than previously expected, particularly for a conflict-torn country that sees dozens of lives lost to insurgency-related violence every week.
"It was a relative success for Afghan security forces.
The Taliban are the ones that dont want elections. They want to rle by force. The Afghan people dont want to be ruled by force, and 70% voted against the Taliban last election, despite the Taliban threats, and death squads.
The Afghans had an election in 2019, ad there is no proof of voter fraud. Ghani is still the duly elected president.
Election authorities have put their faith in biometric voter verification machines, already shipped to every polling station to take the fingerprints and photo of every voter and record the time they cast their ballot.
Those timestamps and individual voter details – linked to a national identity card – should make ballot stuffing extremely difficult, say experts monitoring the poll.
The campaign of Ashraf Ghani is also convinced technology will help them keep tabs on overall vote tallies, and provide early confirmation of results.
An app built for the campaign will be on the phone of a campaign observer in every polling centre. When results are tallied at the end of voting the volunteer will take a picture of the results sheet and manually enter the vote total for each candidate.
Those details will feed into a database that the team says will calculate final results either late on Saturday or the next morning, weeks before the official tally.
They did try to sort out corruption last election, and there is no proof Ghani cheated.