ONE NEWS

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 KABUL: Incumbent Hamid Karzai narrowly led the race for the Afghan presidency with just two percent more votes than his closest rival, the election commission announced Tuesday in the first partial results. The partial results amount to about 10 percent of the total ballots cast in Afghanistan's only second direct presidential election, which was held last Thursday and has been overshadowed by claims of massive fraud. "From the total 524,444 valid votes, Hamid Karzai has got 212,927 and Abdullah Abdullah has 202,889 votes," a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission (IEC) told a news conference. Those results handed Karzai 40.6 percent of the initial votes announced and Abdullah 38.6 percent. Ramazan Bashardost, a popular Afghan lawmaker who camps out in a tent near parliament and campaigned against corruption, got 53,740 votes and former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani 15,143 votes, the commission announced. "I repeat again, this...

Friday, August 21, 2009 KABUL: Vote counting in Afghanistan's second-ever direct presidential election is under way after polls closed on Thursday, officials have said.A runoff, if required, would be held within two weeks after the official results are announced.Despite candidates' calls for Afghans to defy the Taliban's warnings of violence and come out to vote in the presidential and provincial-council elections, the effort appears to have been only partially successful.However, Taliban attacks and threats deterred many in the southern and southeastern Pashtun-populated regions from going to polling stations. The development could undermine incumbent President Hamid Karzai's bid for another five-year term, at least in the first round, due to his dependence on the votes of fellow Pashtuns in those regions. Twenty-six civilians and security-force personnel were killed as a result of election-day attacks, according to Afghan security officials, who also claimed to have p...