A member of the Independent Election Commission, Maulana Mohammad Abdullah, in a tweet on Tuesday revealed that preliminary results of the presidential elections will not be announced on Oct. 19—the scheduled date--if the transfer of data from biometric devices to the main server moves on at the current slow pace.

Abdullah said that preliminary data from 22,400 biometric devices, and final results from 14,000 biometric devices, have been transferred to the main server.

He added that it will be “impossible” to announce the preliminary results on Oct.19 if the process moves forward like this.

According to Abdullah, the commission is supposed to enter the data of 26,568 polling centers (from 26,568 biometric devices) into the main database.

The head of the Election Commission’s secretariat, Habib-Ur-Rahman Nang, said that internet access is the main challenge to the transfer of data to the main server.

According to the original process, the data was supposed to be automatically transferred from the biometric devices at the end of the polling day after they were connected to the internet. But 11 days have past and the data is still transferring to the main server.

“It is not a difficult task, in fact it is easy now. More than 26,000 biometric devices arrived at the commission on Oct. 5. We have received the devices only three days ago,” Nang said.

TOLOnews reporter Sharif Amiri visited the center on Tuesday and observed that the entering of data from each biometric device takes more than an hour.

“You know that this is a technical task. Sometimes it is fast and sometimes it is slow, but we are committed to announcing the results based on the timeline,” head of the Election Commission, Hawa Alam Nuristani said.