While security is deemed as the greatest threat to the upcoming elections scheduled for 5th April, election frauds that can have equal or even more destructing outcomes are not being taken as serious. Indeed insecurity and issues like corruption are highly interlinked to rigging of votes. It is a more dangerous off-spring of the kind of situation prevailing in Afghanistan. There are hundreds of polling stations that are under threat of Taliban and other groups of insurgents. However, there are chances vote rigging in almost all polling station across the country, even in capital Kabul.

The Afghan people and other national and international organizations that were allowed to monitor the previous elections witnessed massive frauds. The 2009 presidential election, for example, was characterized by lack of security, low voter turnout and widespread ballot stuffing, intimidation, and other electoral fraud. Same was the case with subsequent parliamentary election that was held in 2010.

It is the core responsibility of Afghanistan Independent Election Commission (IEC) to prevent frauds from happening on the Election Day. But the agony is that incidents of vote rigging in any of the elections so far held in Afghanistan have been more than in its preceding one. This speaks of inability of IEC.

There is no doubt that the government has failed to provide a desired environment of holding elections. Despite government’s claims, security has drastically deteriorated. Apart from the security issues, there are certain measures that IEC could take based on its experience in the previous elections to prevent ballot stuffing and other kinds of frauds in spring election. But it has not.

People, on the direction of certain groups, have obtained multiple of voting cards from IEC voters’ registrations centers. IEC officials working at these centers have issued voting cards to scores of individuals that have not completed the legal age for voting. The voter cards issued by the IEC can be easily produced by anyone who has little knowledge in computer graphics. Therefore, there are millions of fake voting cards. There are also people who possess thousands of such cards and are ready to sell them for nominal amount of money. Meanwhile, in the previous presidential election the IEC was able to announce the final results months of the election was held. No one knows what happened in the period between the election date 20 August, 2009 and the date of announcement of its results 21 October, 2009?  

The IEC is spending millions of dollars for conducting each election but has not been able to efficiently control the situations as stated above. Knowing the weak points of the IEC, certain political groups seem to have started preparing for frauds in the upcoming election months ago. The legitimacy of April 5th election is, therefore, already under question.