After much controversy and a few days delay, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) announced the preliminary results of the second round of presidential election on the eve of Monday. According to the revealed result Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is leading with around a million votes over his rival Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Ahmadzai is said to have secured a total of 4,485,888 votes or 56.4 percent while Abdullah has got 3,461,639 or 43.6 percent.

The IEC Chairman Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani announced that a total of 8.109493 million ballots had been found valid and that the turnout was around 60 percent, 38 percent of which was women.

The result has been announced while the controversy is still going on between the two candidates. Dr. Abdullah had claimed engineering fraud by the IEC members and had withdrawn from the election process. Still it is not sure how his confidence would be regained by IEC, government officials or international community. Nonetheless, recently there have been talks between him and his rival, the two vice presidents and the members of international community, including US officials. Even before the results were announced the talks were underway between him and his rival Ashraf Ghani and there are expectations that they might have agreed to deal with the fraud allegations.

Nuristani also confirmed vote rigging and promised a more extensive investigation before final results were released. "We cannot ignore the technical problems and fraud during the election process. Some governors and government officials were involved in fraud."

In line with the election law, after the announcement, the IEC sends the preliminary results to the complaints panel, which will take 10 days to complete the process of probing objections. With the complaints addressed, the IEC is expected to unveil the final result on July 14. If the watchdog does not drastically alter the results, Ahmadzai will be sworn in as next president on the 5th day of Eidul Fitr.

However, Abdullah has never been satisfied of the measures carried out by IEC. Even a couple of days before the results were announced; he clearly indicated that any result would not be acceptable by his team unless the valid votes were separated from the invalid ones. Now, it is really important how he would react after the announcement of the results. Is he going to be satisfied with the IEC’s suggestion to carryout audit of the votes in certain provinces or he would turn to protests and rallies against the results?

The better option would definitely be to sit together with the relevant authorities and reach to a conclusion through negotiations. The IEC, ECC and presidential palace must also make sure that they tackle the situation properly and do not get biased in the favor of a particular candidate and save the country from turning towards chaos and instability.