Almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast in Afghanistan's parliamentary election last month were invalid, election officials said today, but they hailed the poll a success despite low turnout and complaints.
The top UN envoy in Afghanistan applauded the country's election body for its handling of the counting process, but said "considerable fraud" had been carried out on polling day and called for those responsible to be held accountable.
While announcing preliminary results, Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) said 5.6 million votes had been cast - more than a million above earlier estimates - but that it had thrown out 1.3 million of them for various reasons.
The commission also said it had disqualified ballots collected from 2,543 of the 17,744 polling stations that opened for the September 18th election.
"We can very proudly say that the turnout in this election process was higher than our expectations. In the current situation in Afghanistan, this is a success," commission chairman Fazl Ahmad Manawi told a news conference.
The election for Afghanistan's lower house of parliament, or wolesi jirga, went ahead despite a Taliban threat to disrupt it, but Western nations have been wary of dubbing it a success after the fiasco of last year's fraud-marred presidential ballot.
Donors are less concerned about individual results for the 249 seats as they are about the level of fraud committed.
The credibility of the vote will weigh heavily when President Barack Obama reviews Washington's Afghan war strategy in December amid mounting violence, rising troop casualties and sagging public support.
Staffan de Mistura, the top UN diplomat in Afghanistan, commended the election commission for "significant improvements" introduced since last year's presidential poll but said perpetrators of fraud had to be brought to justice.
Preliminary results were due on October 8th but were pushed back twice by the election commission to allow for more verifications and recounts. Final results are not likely to be released until well into next month, after the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission sifts through thousands of complaints.
Reuters