All Afghan elections to date have been
bankrolled - and largely organized - by
international donors. In advance of 2014, Afghans
and donors alike need to decide what to do to
stage a credible presidential election and what
can realistically be done given the timetable and
costs.
Current Afghan law requires voters
to present a registration card. Since 2003, the
donor community has spent some US$300 million to
register voters in an attempt to prevent duplicate
voting and keep ineligible voters at bay.
The result has been an ineffectual,
expensive, and easily circumvented registration
system that is barely worthy of the name. But more
importantly, the problems it is designed to
address have proven completely negligible when
compared to
more prevalent forms of
fraud such as ballot box stuffing and fraudulent
counting.
Before it spends any more money
on Afghanistan's troubled election process, the
international community needs to take an honest
accounting of what actually helps provide for a
credible election.
History of Afghan
voter registration Donor assistance began
with a focus on creating a voter registry. The
first registration was held December 2003-August
2004 prior to the 2004 presidential election. The
cost was roughly $120 million for 11.3 million
registrations. While the registration forms
included fields for voters' addresses, forms were
often not filled in completely, and only the
province was reliably entered into a database.
Registration cards (a tear-off portion of the
form), with province listed, were issued on the
spot. No system prevented individuals from
registering multiple times.
Perhaps the
failure to enter address data was due to time or
cost constraints. It also may have seemed
unnecessary, because the entire country was a
single jurisdiction for the presidential election.
There was no assignment to voting places and no
voter lists were produced. People could vote
anywhere in the country simply by presenting a
voter card that was hole-punched after voting. No
use was made of the database. Only ink applied to
the voter's finger prevented people from casting
multiple votes.
A four-week registration
drive before the 2005 provincial council and
parliamentary elections added about 1.7 million
registrations to the 2003-2004 database. Again,
some incomplete address information was collected,
but province was indicated on the voter's card.
Since these elections were conducted
province-wide, the card was sufficient to allow
the individual to vote anywhere in the province.
As in 2004, there were no voter lists and no use
was made of the database.
Prior to the
2009 presidential and provincial council
elections, a registration drive billed as an
update was held, but people who had registered
earlier could easily do so again, any number of
times. Approximately 4.5 million registrations
were collected and (partially) entered into a new
database. In 2010, before the parliamentary
election, another brief update added about 300,000
registrations. Province was indicated on the
voter's card, and finger ink was again the only
deterrent to duplicate voting.
By 2008,
the problem of duplicate registrations was well
known. An individual who cleaned his fingers could
vote multiple times simply by presenting a
different card at each polling station.
The solution chosen for the 2008-2009
registration was to collect biometrics -
thumbprints and photographs - in order to detect
and eliminate duplicate registrations through an
automated database match process. But thumbprints
and photographs, taken by minimally trained local
registrars across Afghanistan, were of uneven
quality. Neither was reliably effective in
detecting duplicates in the database, and women
voters were not required to be photographed.
Even if the biometrics worked and the
database were cleaned of duplicates, biometrics
would prevent multiple voting only if there was a
connection between the database and the polling
place. If the database contained address
information to allow the assignment of voters to
polling centers and the printing of voter lists,
the voter's name (listed only once in the
database) would appear only at one designated
polling center.
But because address
information needed for producing voter lists was
never entered, an individual with multiple cards
could vote multiple times even if duplicates were
biometrically eliminated from the database. That
is, in the absence of address information and
assignment of voters to polling places, the
biometric exercise was completely pointless.
So even after all these years of expensive
registration efforts, Afghanistan still lacks an
effective voter registration system. No use has
been made of either database, and no voter lists
have been or can be generated. All that has been
achieved is the distribution of some 17 million
cards, with some unknown number of individuals
having multiple cards. Ink on the finger is the
one and only means of preventing duplicate voting.
Solving the wrong problems There
have been many Afghan media reports of individuals
with dozens of cards and as a result, Afghans seem
to regard the registration "system" as ridden with
fraud.
Living in Afghanistan during the
2004, 2005, 2009, and 2010 elections, however, I
recall no public discussion of the sheer
unlikelihood of individuals running around voting
multiple times. A voter who scrubbed his finger
might have voted more than once, but due to the
time involved in traveling and waiting in line,
multiple voting seems unlikely to have any
discernable effect on an election. In view of the
minimal significance of duplicate voting, an
expensive biometric process - even if well done -
seems like a solution in search of a problem.
More importantly, why is registration
needed at all? The answer is important for future
decisions about electoral procedures and has
significant implications for cost.
In a
democracy, decisions should be made by those who
have the legal capacity to participate and must
live with the results - not by outsiders.
Eligibility is an issue in the United States given
the number of people in the country who are not US
citizens (tourists, business visitors, immigrants
in various stages of processing, undocumented
migrants, and so forth). In Europe, with open
borders, those present in one country may well be
citizens of another.
But in Afghanistan,
there are essentially no tourists, few immigrants,
and only a few individuals of Pakistani or other
origin (usually readily identifiable as such)
present in the country. While Afghan birthdates
are often not known precisely, age is not
difficult to estimate based on appearance and
local vouching. When registration cards have been
issued to minors, this appears to be a matter of
registrar fraud rather than actual uncertainty
about age.
The number of adults in
Afghanistan on a presidential election day who are
legally unqualified to vote is so small as to be
statistically insignificant in an electorate of at
least 12 million. The cost of a registration
process designed to detect this handful of
ineligible voters - which has thus far been
totally ineffective at actually doing so - is
certainly not worth it, especially while
significant sources of fraud go unaddressed. It
appears that the donor emphasis on registration
beginning in 2003 reflects Western election issues
rather than any concerns rooted in the Afghan
context.
Donor money should go towards the
real sources of Afghan electoral fraud - not
duplicate voting, but ballot box stuffing and
fraudulent counting.
In the United States,
ballot box stuffing is difficult - due to the
number of observers present in polling places,
media and parties matching ballots cast against
turnout, and the use of reporting systems that
allow results within an hour or two of the polls
closing.
In Afghanistan, ballot box
stuffing is extremely easy. The lack of observers
and media - reflecting both insecurity and the
embryonic development of civil society and
political institutions - makes real voter turnout
very difficult to determine and render it easy for
local officials and strongmen to control ballot
boxes. One NGO, Free and Fair Election Foundation
of Afghanistan, has shown the way on observation
and reporting but is limited in national reach.
The international community lacks good
information about the extent to which vote
counting has been manipulated either locally or at
the data center in Kabul. We do know that there
has been no systematic means of preventing or
detecting fraud in the count at any level.
In the ballot boxes I observed during a
fraud investigation in Kandahar in 2009, tally
sheets sealed in the ballot boxes accurately
reported the number of ballots in the box that
were fraudulently marked for President Hamid
Karzai. That is, election workers went to the
trouble of filling out bogus ballots rather than
just listing a fraudulent total. Ballot box
stuffing was the big-ticket fraud. Approximately a
million ballots were thrown out in the south due
to such fraud.
The way
forward Given the statutory requirement of
a voter card, the Afghan Independent Election
Commission (IEC) has recently proposed that
individuals vote in 2014 using an old registration
card. Popular opposition to this announcement
probably reflects both disillusionment with the
old duplicates and a belief - fostered by
international donors - that registration matters.
In any case, using the old cards provides an
incomplete solution since no cards have been
issued since 2010. Many people would be ineligible
to vote, lacking a card of any vintage. What to do
given the late hour?
If Afghanistan were
following the constitutional election calendar, it
would be very easy to conduct the 2014
presidential election: eliminate the statutory
registration requirement. Anyone who appears to be
Afghan and old enough should be able to vote. The
handful of "ineligibles" voting would only add
noise. Ink would prevent duplicate voting.
But this simple solution does not suffice
since the IEC has complicated matters for 2014.
Instead of scheduling the provincial council
elections for 2013 per the constitution, the IEC
has decided to delay these elections - citing
reasons of cost - and combine them with the
presidential election. For provincial elections,
residence in the province is required. While most
old registration cards specify province, voters
without cards would lack this documentation.
Given the failures of past Kabul-based
registration efforts, conducting a new national
registration to issue new provincial identifier
cards to these individuals seems questionable -
especially since most Afghans already have a
tazkira, the Afghan identity card. While
there are variations in the cards (which are
handwritten, issued locally, and not reflected in
any database), they generally include the province
of issuance and sometimes place of residence, and
hence could establish provincial eligibility.
There have been many reports of district
officials demanding inflated fees for tazkiras.
This would be a good time for the Afghan
government to crack down on such extortion and
also require more uniformity in the collection of
province and other information. This is a service
delivery improvement that could be readily be
implemented at virtually no cost. Presidential and
provincial elections could be conducted in 2014
with no further registration effort.
The
Afghan government in fact recently announced plans
to issue an "e-tazkira", an electronic version of
the identity card with a centralized database, to
be used for various governmental benefits and also
for election registration. It would be implemented
by the Ministry of Communications and Information
Technology, a technically quite capable ministry.
Yet because of the uselessness of the two
databases created since 2003, this would require a
complete re-registration of the entire Afghan
adult population. Even if the system - in contrast
to all previous efforts - were well designed and
executed, it is an expensive undertaking, and
completion before the projected April 5, 2014,
election date is a sheer logistical impossibility.
Partial re-registration would be politically
contentious, and would also represent little
technical improvement over the current partial
registration (that is, those in possession of
cards issued 2010 and earlier).
If
Afghanistan wants to create an e-tazkira for its
own purposes, it can do so - but there is no
reason for the international community to finance
a rushed effort on the assumption that it is
necessary before holding the 2014 presidential
election.
Besides supplying copious
quantities of high-quality finger ink, the
international community should invest in combating
the real sources of electoral fraud. For example,
inventory controls on the ballots and audits in
the counting systems would be very useful. Current
SMS technologies would enable poll watchers and
local NGOs to provide real-time reporting of
turnout and results, providing a check on ballot
box stuffing.
A credible presidential
election could set Afghanistan on a more stable
path. If we focus on real sources of fraud rather
than the window dressing of registration, we can
yet make a real contribution before we head for
the exits.
Ms Inge Fryklund, JD,
PhD, has worked with election systems in the U.S.
and Kosovo as well as in Afghanistan. She has
spent more than four years in Afghanistan,
including working with USAID for the 2004 and 2005
elections, the Afghan Independent Election
Commission (IEC) Data Center during the 2009 voter
registration period and on the election fraud
investigation in Kandahar following the 2009
presidential election. She can be reached via
inge.fryklund@gmail.com.
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