Presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah on Friday asked the protestors currently blocking the offices of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) to allow the recount of the votes in the seven remaining provinces so that “no excuse is left.” 

“After the elections, the great Afghan people raised their voice against ‘fraud.’ They organized protests to halt fraud by the election commission in the provinces,” said Abdullah.

He said that currently the main conflict is around “fraud” and transparency and that he will never accept any result which he believes will be “infected with fraud.”

“We will never accept any partial, preliminary or final results that are fraudulent,” he said.

“One side ‘faked’ 700,000 votes and now it tries to show it as 300,000. But the other side wants only transparency and demands legal actions defined by the election law,” he said.

Abdullah noted that the election commission has not acted on its legal responsibilities and it has failed to convince the Afghan people, candidates and the election observers about transparency in the elections.

Abdullah also stated that under no circumstances will they accept 102,000 “wrong date and wrong time votes” or the 137,000 questionable votes; however, he said that it’s a first step to show “goodwill” — and he asked the IEC to reconsider its decisions. Abdullah is referring to votes which were registered with biometric devices but that had a timestamp falling outside of the legal voting hours. The IEC has claimed that user error and other practical issues caused the problem, not fraud.

Abdullah added that only the biometric votes which were cast on the election day will be considered valid votes.

He also called on the IEC to provide clarification to the 2400 ballot boxes that are lacking biometric information.

This comes hours after representatives of the election campaign teams and other groups attended a meeting on Friday organized by the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC) to resolve the electoral crisis, but the event ended without any resolution, similar to the failed attempt by the Independent Election Commission’s (IEC) to hold an electoral meeting last week.

Addressing the event, the IECC chairperson Zohra Bayan Shinwari called on the IEC to announce the preliminary poll results “as soon as possible.”

She said the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission has so far addressed over 4,500 complaints.