ECC’s State of Play: Most Complaints Have Been Triaged

Kabul, Oct 7 – The Electoral Complaints Commission on Thursday summarized some of the details from the Complaints Statistics on its website.

The commission says it has effectively completed categorizing the complaints, since those it has yet to categorize, or triage—about 100 of the 4,000 received—will probably be dismissed for arriving too late. Nearly 1,000 complaints were received from Sept 22—after the three-day period in which complaints are ordinarily allowed.

Out-of-time complaints may only be accepted if (a) the allegation made is so serious as clearly to require follow-up, or (b) the complainant has a good reason for late filing.“We may expect to receive more complaints as the IEC releases results, but all except tallying problems will be out of time,” the ECC said.

Some more pickings from the ECC press release:

• Kuchi-related complaints amount to 39 of the 3,847 intaken, i.e. around 1% of all complaints.
• At intake complaints are categorised by type: 41% relate to polling irregularities, 17% to undue influence (intimidation, violence, campaigning at the polling centre), 13% to problems of access to the polling centre, 11% to counting irregularities, less than 2% to missing materials, and an insignificant number to tally centre results – this last is to be expected since the IEC is still releasing tallies. The remaining 15% of complaints do not fall into any of these categories.
• Gender issues: It’s not always possible to categorise respondents’ and complainants’ gender – for instance, a complainant organisation has no gender, or if there is more than one respondent both genders may be involved – but overall 11% of complainants are women and 87% men, while 9% of respondents are women and 74% men. The remainder are unclassified. (Note that the Kabul PECC has not yet classified some 80% of their respondents by gender, and that this will certainly affect the 9:74 ration given here.) 
• The largest category of complainants is “candidates/candidate agents” – which is to be expected: not only is there a very large field of close on 2,500 contenders for some 250 seats (which means that only ±10% of the candidates will be winners, and ±90% losers) but candidates are the people who potentially have most to gain directly from a complaint. 68% of complaints have been received from candidates/candidate agents, 22% from other individuals, 5% from organisations, and the remaining 5% are unclassified.