KABUL - Nadir Mohseni, a member and the spokesman of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), said that the Commission has already received complaints against Presidential and Provincial Council candidates since the registration period ended on Sunday.
"Over the past two-days we have received eight complaints against electoral candidates," said Mr. Mohseni. However, he refused to comment on the nature of the complaints or the names of the candidates they were lodged against.
The ECC will soon begin investigating the complaints and take appropriate action in accordance with the prevailing Election Laws. Mr. Mohseni said that if any of the complaints are proved valid then the candidacy of those nominees would be rejected.
A number of Afghan and foreign human rights groups have come out publically since the nomination process ended and decried the presence of supposed human rights violators and warlords amongst the 27 nominees who filed for Presidential nomination and the 3,000 who registered for the Provincial Council elections.
Mr. Mohseni urged citizens to register their complaints against any candidate along with what evidence they can provide to substantiate their accusations at offices of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), which are located in all 34 provinces.
The ECC has been tasked with vetting the candidates that registered during the nomination period, filtering out any who have ties to insurgents or Illegal Armed Groups (IAGs) or have criminal records. Additionally, verification of the documents submitted by the tickets will be scrutinized and are expected to hold up to the standards laid out in the Election Laws.
On Tuesday, members of the Young Activists for Reform and Chance (YARC) called on the IEC to reject any Presidential candidates that went about the registration process dishonestly, including those who paid for voting cards or made fraudulent ones in order to show they had enough support to meet the IEC's threshold of 100,000 documented supporters
Noor Mohammad Noor, the spokesman of the IEC, assured on Wednesday that if any candidate is found to have violated any of the laws in the submission of a nomination application, his/her candidature would be rejected. He explained that the rigorous evaluation process would begin with the details of each candidate being entered into a database.
"The database will help in three ways: First, to segregate the fake voter cards from the authentic ones; second, to prevent the usage of the same voter card by another candidate; and three, to count the number of voter cards submitted by the candidates, which should be from at least 20 provinces," said Mr. Noor.
With memories of rampant electoral improprieties in the 2009 Presidential elections still fresh in the minds of many Afghans, concerns about fraud are widespread and arguably well-founded.
The April 5 elections are considered crucial in determining Afghanistan's future at the daunting juncture presented by both the departure of President Hamid Karzai from office and coalition forces from the country after over ten years in the driver's seat. And the legitimacy of the elections and their outcome, or at least the perception of it, is regarded to be the crux of their success. (Tolo News)