KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - The sheer volume of accusations of ballot box stuffing, fraud and voter intimidation in the Afghan presidential election may be disappointing but it doesn't come as a surprise to the head of the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission.
Grant Kippen, a Canadian as well as the man who chaired the commission during the previous election in this politically-volatile country, said he expected a lot of complaints -- again.
The commission has received more than 2,000 complaints from all of the candidates in the Aug. 20 vote. Investigations are focusing only on the more serious allegations brought forward.
"The ones that we have given top priority -- some 613 complaints -- are the ones we're focusing on at the moment," Kippen said Monday in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press.
"They have the potential to change election results."
"If we investigate a complaint that involves ballot stuffing at a polling station level and determine in fact that has happened, then one of the sanctions we can effect is to exclude that ballot box from being counted," he added.
"I wouldn't say there's any surprises -- nothing that we hadn't anticipated," Kippen said. "I think just from sheer numbers we expected that this is what we would end up with."
But the temperature of the political rhetoric surrounding the vote has been rising, akin to the 40-degree heat scorching the country's southern region this week.
Haji Ahsan, a provincial council member from Kandahar, for example, is not mincing his words.
"I can say that it was all fraud and it wasn't done by one or two persons, it was done by everybody who was part of the election," he said.
"This kind of government loses the trust of people."
Ahsan said figures indicated there were 10,000 ballots cast in the Maywand District but in reality the turnout was only a fraction of that.
Kippen said the deadline for complaints has passed and he doesn't expect the numbers to get any higher.
There have been complaints throughout Afghanistan but the lion's share comes from the south where the Taliban still has a strong hold on the public psyche and voting was strongly discouraged by the insurgents.
Preliminary results have been coming out in dribs and drabs, with incumbent President Hamid Karzai slowly edging closer to the 50 per cent of the vote he needs to clinch a victory over his chief challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.
Although they don't like what they're seeing, some Afghans say fraud or no fraud, it won't have any impact on the final outcome.
"The win won't be legitimate but Karzai is a powerful man and all the warlords are with him," said Shamsullah, a Kandahar shopkeeper.
The final results are expected around the middle of September, but that hinges on the pace of the investigation by the Electoral Complaints Commission.
"Right now the election committee is announcing preliminary results but they can't certify the final results until we've finished investigating and adjudicating those complaints," Kippen explained.
Kippen indicated last fall that the international community needed to take a greater role in protecting the legitimacy of an electoral process that, in many ways, failed to win over skeptical locals in the 2005 presidential vote.
That may need to be examined again once the current process is complete, he said.
"I think that's something that after this whole thing is over will be to sit down and do a kind of lessons learned and look at those kind of issues and what can be done for next time."
