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Audit of suspected Afghan ballots to start soon

AFP, Kabul
More than 3,000 ballot boxes containing votes suspected of having been cast fraudulently in Afghanistan's presidential election have arrived in the capital Kabul for audit, officials said yesterday.
Afghans went to the polls on August 20 to elect their president for the next five years, but allegations of wide-spread fraud -- mainly directed against President Hamid Karzai -- have delayed the announcement of a winner.
Karzai leads the preliminary results with around 55 percent of the vote. He needs 50 percent plus one vote to be declared the winner.
His main rival Abdullah Abdullah has around 28 percent, and has been at the forefront of vote-rigging accusations against Karzai.
Pivotal to the outcome --which could be announced later this week -- is the result of the audit of 3,063 ballot boxes that have been returned to Kabul from polling stations across the country for a sampleaudit.
Noor Mohammad Noor, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission (IEC), told AFP the audit "will start within the next couple of days".
Around ten percent of the 600-700 ballots in each box
will be audited, another official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"A sample will be extrapolated to the larger population of ballot boxes - it Is not a recount as such, but an audit," she said.
"The process is supposed to start tomorrow (Sunday)," she said, adding that observers and candidates' agents were being trained on Saturday in preparation.
"If procedures are finalised tonight they will start tomorrow, otherwise the following day, "she said.
The fraud accusations that have dogged the Afghan vote have dismayed leaders of the international community that has supported the process as a step forward on Afghanistan's road to democracy.
Vote-rigging allegations have been accompanied by controversy, as this week Peter Galbraith, deputy to the UN's special envoy to Afghanistan, was sacked over disagreements with his boss, Kai Eide, over how to deal with the fraud.
Galbraith later said that Eide had been biased in favour of Karzai.
Abdullah told reporters on Saturday that "serious questions" about Eide's role in the elections had emerged from the affair, and the UN's reputation among Afghans had been damaged.