Analysis

October 06, 2010

Kabul, Oct 7 – We’ve just released an updated interactive map illustrating the provinces where polling centers didn’t open. The map shows how much the IEC had to scale back its plans to open polling centers in the north of the country, as well as in the troubled province of Ghazni in the center of the country.

September 22, 2010

Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Process

September 17, 2010

Analyzing the 2005 Vote Spread

KABUL, Sept 17 - The single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system used in Afghanistan's elections can produce a wide range of vote spreads, the difference of votes earned between the candidates winning seats.

In the 2005 election for Afghanistan's lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, some of the vote spreads were very wide, such as in Kabul, where the difference between the top vote earner and the lowest successful candidate was 50,646 votes.

September 12, 2010

Steps to Reduce Fraud

KABUL, Sept 12 - Accusations of widespread fraud and electoral mismanagement marred the conduct of Afghanistan’s Presidential and Provincial Council elections in September 2009. In advance of the upcoming elections for Afghanistan's lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, what is the Independent Election Commission (IEC) doing to deter fraud in Afghanistan's first fully locally-led electoral process? Democracy International has identified a number of operational reforms undertaken by the IEC in its preparation for the upcoming vote, outlined in the video below.

September 04, 2010

Polling Centers: To Close or Not To Close

The decision by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) to remove nearly a thousand polling centers from its preliminary lists has drawn considerable attention; Democracy International continues its analysis of this move with a province-by-province comparison to 2009 polling centers the IEC says opened.

September 02, 2010

Afghanistan's "Lottery Effect"

For all the challenges of campaigning in Afghanistan, candidates in the upcoming elections for the Wolesi Jirga lower house of parliament can take comfort in the fact that winning a seat can sometimes be a matter of securing less than one percent of the vote in their province.

Afghanistan operates under the Single Non-Transferrable Vote (SNTV) system, first chosen by President Hamid Karzai for the founding elections for the Wolesi Jirga in 2005. SNTV is used elsewhere in Jordan, Vanuatu and the upper houses of Indonesia and Thailand.

August 31, 2010

The IEC's Battle Against Fraud, Part 1

This is the first of a series of pieces on IEC fraud mitigation measures—how the election commission is trying to reduce the fraud that plagued last year’s presidential elections. The piece is by Jed Ober, Democracy International’s Election Mission Chief Of Staff in Kabul.

August 22, 2010

Polling Center Analysis

Democracy International's analysts have been taking a closer look at the election commission's August 18 announcement on polling centers. Here's what they found: