While the nation has its eyes on ISIS and the newly opened front in Syria, there has been a critical development in a place where the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars, seen over 2,300 American troops lose their lives, and fought the longest war of our history.
Nearly six months after the first ballot was cast, the Afghan election for president ended on Sunday with former finance minister Ashraf Ghani (pictured) declared the winner by the Afghanistan Independent Election Commission (IEC). The culmination of a 13-year effort by the international community to rebuild Afghanistan after the post 9/11 invasion, the election faced daunting odds of success. Surprising everyone, the voter turnout for the first round was much higher than expected, faced only sporadic violence, and by all accounts avoided widespread fraud. The June runoff, however, was a completely different story. I had the incredible opportunity of working on the ground in Kabul trying to sort it all out.
In some areas, the increase in voter turnout was so high that only industrial attempts at fraud could explain the difference. Abdullah Abdullah, who was ahead by nearly a million votes in the first round, came out of the runoff more than a million votes behind Ashraf Ghani. With Abdullah’s supporters threatening a coup that would throw Afghanistan into complete chaos, Secretary of State John Kerry personally brought the two candidates together and struck a deal, vowing to marshal every resource of the international community to root out the fraud. Overseeing the process, executing the broad framework of the deal, and working out the details would fall to the United Nations.
The UN, and more specifically the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), mobilized technical elections experts from the around the world. In an unprecedented and historical effort, over 140 experts — some with 20 years of technical experience advising and observing elections from Timor, Nepal, Iraq, and beyond — heard the call for help and flew to Kabul on a moment’s notice. What they found when they got there, however, was unlike any mission before.
Technical election work is very, well, technical. Any election supervisor in the United States knows there is a right way to register voters, and a wrong way. A correct procedure for documenting who has voted, and a wrong way. A “by the book” method to conduct a recount, and a wrong way. In the case of an audit, processes and procedures are set before the audit begins and are held constant throughout. The process that UNDP volunteered to take on, however, was not technical in any way.
Afghanistan is a young democracy. Although there are many areas of the country that understand the concept of “one person, one vote,” there are huge numbers of people in the outlying provinces that are just now being introduced to the concept of voting in general. If the head of a household decides that his family is going to vote for one candidate, they all agree because that’s the way things have been done for thousands of years, and he subsequently casts their votes, is this fraud? Issues like these don’t have to be worked out in technical election work. The answer, of course, is yes — and there are procedures in place to prevent this type of voting from occurring. But in rural Afghanistan, where some people have never even held a pen before, a political solution must be found.
UNDP did a masterful job of taking on this task. Even while mediating negotiations between the two candidates and attempting to keep the process as transparent as possible, it became clear just how much the Afghans had yet to learn about democracy and elections, and as a result the rules of the audit changed on a regular basis. Perhaps the most complicated task undertaken by the UNDP was to determine when ballot box stuffing had occurred. To do this, auditors looked at hundreds of ballots from a specific box and made a judgment on which ones were similar enough that they had clearly been marked by one or a few people. Often times, there were hundreds of ballots that were clearly marked by the same hand, and those were easy to invalidate. Both candidates seemed to agree that even Afghans who cast their own vote as well as their family’s vote also might have risked their lives to go to the polls should have their vote count. But many boxes had between 6 and 12 similarly marked ballots, indicating a high probability of family voting. In this case, how many similar ballots would there have to be before they were invalidated? 10? 20? More? Moreover, what criteria constitutes “similar?” The discussion and negotiation can stretch on indefinitely when a presidency is at stake.
With those questions and more being answered in a different way every day, UNDP advisers made recommendations and decisions while facing confusion, yelling, pleading, and rage from passionate agents fighting for every single one of their candidate’s votes—all the while under the scrutiny of even more third party international observers.
A massive bureaucracy such as UNDP should not be flexible enough to mount such an unprecedented effort at a moment’s notice. They are supposed to stick with what they are good at and with what they know: in this case, technical election advising. But Secretary Kerry took the risk of flying to Kabul to find a solution between the two candidates despite the strong possibility of failure, and UNDP took the risk of embroiling itself in a political situation of which there was no guarantee of success.
Still, we must be clear: though Afghans from all over the country risked their lives to vote in this election, there was massive fraud in the runoff. As an auditor, I personally invalidated thousands of votes — a task which I did not take lightly. But in a country that has never before experienced a peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another, fraud and imperfect elections are to be expected. Democracy will mature over time in Afghanistan, and in five years elections will be more legitimate than they are now, and even more legitimate five years after that.
Some elections “experts” and academics will call the 2014 runoff a farce, and in some ways, that may be true. Nonetheless, the Afghan people who stood up to the Taliban and risked their lives to go to the polls deserved a clear and decisive result, and one which reflected the will of the people. I know more than a few Afghans questioned the point of the runoff if there was just going to be a power sharing agreement anyway. But the fact that these questions are being asked in the first place show that Afghans know just how much is at stake when it comes to future elections; while this will discourage some who will stay home next time, others will work that much harder for more transparency, less fraud, and higher participation.
But this moment — one which comes after 13 years of sacrifice by the international community in blood and treasure — called for a political solution. This diplomatic victory would not been possible without the extraordinary work of Secretary Kerry, the UNDP’s auditors, and the United Nations. But most important to the process are the countless Afghan patriots fighting for a stronger, peaceful Afghanistan. I personally worked with hundreds of them, and I wish them the best as the forge forward to a democratic future.
Jonathan Murray is a fellow at the Truman National Security Project and worked on the UNDP auditing team in Kabul.
