Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) has disqualified roughly 1.3 million ballots from the country's 18 September parliamentary election, ruling them fraudulent or irregular. The voided votes represent about 23 percent of the approximately 5.6 million ballots counted on polling day.
IEC chairman Fazil Ahmad Manawi announced preliminary results alongside the fraud figures, flagging 224 candidates as suspicious and subject to further investigation. Final results are not expected before the end of October, and could slip further as investigators work through thousands of formal complaints, including allegations against individual candidates.
More than 2,500 candidates competed for 249 seats in the lower house, the Wolesi Jirga, with 406 women among them contesting 68 seats reserved by quota. In the southwestern province of Nimroz, both available seats went to women candidates.
The scale of the disqualification mirrors Afghanistan's 2009 presidential election, in which roughly 1.5 million ballots were similarly discarded. A Western official speaking anonymously described the parliamentary poll as no less corrupt or violent than that presidential race a year earlier.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in October 2010, in its own words.