Afghanistan: Attention Rivets on Complaint Commission as Fraud Allegations Mount

As evidence of electoral fraud continues to mount, and the Afghan government delays publicizing results of the August 20 presidential and provincial council elections, attention is focusing on a single point -- the Electoral Complaints Commission. Comprised of Afghan and international advisers, the ECC - the repository for all allegations of electoral fraud, manipulation and wrongdoing - will not only help determine the final outcome of the elections, but also the way Afghans view the democratic process.

According to the most recent figures, the ECC has received 2,187 complaints since polling day, of which it says 652 have the potential to influence results.

Grant Kippen, the ECC's Canadian head, held the same position during the last elections in 2005. He says awareness about voters' rights and the electoral process has increased over the past four years. In an interview with EurasiaNet, Kippen laid out the tasks and the limitations of the ECC, insisting that the commission's role is not to rubber stamp a process that lacks legitimacy, but to add credibility to Afghanistan's democratic process.

EurasiaNet: How do you compare the political contest today to 2005?
Kippen: It may sound hokey, but I am not really paying much attention to the political situation. We have a lot of challenges just because we were late in setting up this organization and getting our headquarters open; finding and hiring people; training them; getting our provincial offices open. We had the first meeting of our commission on April 26. [Editor's note: Dates for the 2009 elections were only finalized in late January after a political tussle between the president and parliament.]

EurasiaNet: Do you feel the expectations of the ECC are too high and too wide? Are there things that people should not be expecting from this office when the final results are out?
Kippen: I think people are expecting us to make some sort of statement about the credibility and the legitimacy of the elections. We are not going to do that. We will be rendering decisions based on the complaints we receive. We'll let the decisions speak for themselves. How others want to interpret our decisions -- that is up to them.

EurasiaNet: The pressure on your commission has increased since the international community was seen to have rushed too quickly to endorse the elections. Do you think this has increased the expectations people have of the ECC?
Kippen: If you look at the process, we have very little ability to influence activities at the front end before they take place. We deal with alleged violations - infractions. It is after something takes place that our role comes into play.

We can inform people about what we do and hopefully discourage the various stakeholders from taking wrong actions, or what is deemed to be in violation of the electoral law. But we have very little influence in being able to actively prevent things. One of the things, had we been established earlier, we could have done more of, was public outreach - to advise candidates and others about the law, and what they needed to respect. But there is also a responsibility on all the stakeholder groups involved in the process to know the law as well. We can only do so much from our perspective.

EurasiaNet: Your mandate enables you to order a re-poll. Theoretically speaking, could you order the entire election process to be rescinded and held again?
Kippen: Under the law, it states re-polling [is in our mandate], so theoretically you could say the entire country. But you have to think of what that would entail, what kind of evidence would be needed to make that kind of decision. In the complaints that have come in since Election Day, I don't recall any saying that the entire elections were fraudulent and therefore the entire process needs to be redone. The complaints have been about a certain polling station or polling center, about certain districts.

EurasiaNet: But if they were widespread enough, might a certain percentage - an overwhelming percentage - be considered enough to call for a re-poll?
Kippen: We will have to wait and see. We are still in the early days of our investigations and some of the complaints do speak to large areas - a district-wide basis. We will have to see what evidence comes forward from the investigations and make our decisions accordingly.

EurasiaNet: There has been much focus on fraud and malpractice. But many voters were unable to vote. Does your mandate look at people's inability to exercise their right to vote? And to what extent did insecurity prevent people from voting?
Kippen: Yes, some of the allegations are about access to a polling station or polling center. That is something we will be investigating. We would have to look at what kind of remedy was possible, if security was an issue, and if it prevented people [from voting].

If the polling station was open and people did not come to vote, one can argue that was a personal decision. We can't fault the IEC, [the president-appointed Independent Election Commission] or the security forces. The IEC went to a lot of effort to make sure they could open as many polling centers as possible. But we also have to recognize that we are in a conflict environment here.

EurasiaNet: One of the things you have addressed is the absence of benchmarks, and the need for an electoral certification process. In the absence of that, is everyone fishing around to determine what constitutes credibility?
Kippen: At the end of the day it's really the Afghan population: the voter population that is going to have to decide how they felt about the election, and if their will is reflected in the vote.

EurasiaNet: Before the elections, you made a number of recommendations, including the need for a strengthened ECC. But not much has changed since the last elections. Were you going into this process with your hands tied?
Kippen: We basically have a structure that mimics what we had in 2005. It would have been much more advantageous to our organization had we been [formed] earlier. For example, if we had provincial offices established during the challenge period, we would not have had to work the process through IEC provincial offices. We could have done it through our own offices. [Editor's note: The challenge period allows for vetting candidates for possible links to armed groups].

A lot of the things in the observer reports [on the 2005 elections] were not followed through on: the civic education recommended in the interim period, a voter registry, some sort of national identity card, or voter ID. Unfortunately, those things didn't happen in the interim. But we have a process, we can't go back, we just need to look at what we can do going forward.

EurasiaNet: Given the fact your recommendations were not accepted, and given the limitations of resources and your mandate, is there not a risk that you end up rubber-stamping a compromised electoral process?
Kippen: No, I don't think we are rubber-stamping at all. Part of the challenge here - but also a great privilege and opportunity certainly for the internationals - is to work with our Afghan colleagues to build up an institution like the ECC and to try to demonstrate to Afghans that there is an institution that they can rely on, that they can access if they feel they need to. So I don't think we are rubber-stamping anything. I think we have been very upfront and transparent about what we are doing and I think and I hope that that we are able to contribute to the credibility of the process by our actions.