IT’S SIX DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION, AND HE’S GOING TO GIVE US AN UPDATE ON WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON. SO, FIRST BILL, COULD YOU JUST, LIKE I SAID, GIVE US AN UPDATE ON ELECTION PREPARATIONS, AND HOW THINGS ARE PRECEDING IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS.

Yeah, sure thing. The most exciting news in the election preparation front is that the IEC has received advice from security services in the country on the number of polling stations that they have recommended be shut down for security reasons, and number of polling stations they recommend being moved for security reasons. I think this is … the total number is a little over 600, so almost 10 percent of the total polling centers in the country. Obviously a large number of those are going to be in the South, a disproportionate number of them are going to be in the South, because that’s the area of the worst violence so far.

So, the IEC has to decide now, how many of those polling centers actually to closed, how many of them to move, and how are they going to deal with voters who are going to have trouble voting as the result of that.

ANY OTHER UPDATES ON ELECTION PREPARATIONS?

Yeah, another interesting development is the number of observers that so far have been accredited by the IEC. At this point we’re talking about more than 180,000 candidate and political party agents, members of the media, and international and domestic observers. That’s particularly interesting because as we just said, we’re talking about maybe 6,400 or 6,500 polling centers in the country. So if you do the math that’s something like 30-plus observers per polling center, and you have to imagine that they’re going to be fairly well-concentrated in some of the more urban areas, and the more secure areas.

The IEC has made procedural rule about this. Polling center officials can choose to have observers cycle through, so there’s never too many in anyone spot, but there’s a couple of interesting implications: number one, all of those people certified or accredited probably won’t be showing up; number two, there’s going to be some crowded polling centers on election day, which I think makes sense given the high level of international and domestic attention has been paid into this election.

And finally, on a more administrative note, the polling materials, which includes ballots, ballot boxes, ballot box seals, voter ink, ink for the finger of the voters, are all being delivered to polling stations as we speak. So, they’re getting ready, to get things going six days from now.

GREAT, I GUESS ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC HERE, IN THE LAST FEW DAYS ESPECIALLY, WE HEARD, REPORTS OF POTENTIAL DEALS BETWEEN CANDIDATES, OR EVEN WITH LOCAL TALIBAN COMMANDERS TO PREVEN VIOLENCE. WHAT IS DEMOCRACY INTERNATIONAL’S TAKE ON THESE REPORTS?

Well, obviously, we don’t have much more information we can provide on how likely any of these things are going to happen. I would say that we’re getting close to the election, so if any of these can happen, it’ll need to happen in the next couple of days. This is particularly so, because in a country like Afghanistan where you have relatively poor media penetration, difficulty of communicating between areas of the country, if a candidate did withdraw at this point, there’s a few practical barriers that actually getting that information out. For the candidate themselves, if they choose to endorse someone, they’re going to need to get that information to their supporters, make sure their supporters know, you know, I’ve endorsed candidate “X”, which takes time, and it’s a difficult thing to do, so at this stage there are some practical limitations to the political effect of that. That’s not to say that it won’t happen, not to say that we have any information on what kind of deals are or being made, but it’s interesting to think about how it would work on the ground.

AND FOR A VOTER’S STANDPOINT, HOW WOULD THIS AFFECT THEIR EXPERIENCE ON THE ELECTION DAY?

Well, at this point, all of the ballots have been printed for a while now, so the names and the pictures and the symbol on the ballots aren’t going to change. The way the IEC is planning and handling this, and there have already been some candidates who dropped out over the last few weeks and months, so this is something that’s going to come up no matter what happened from here on out. But the way the IEC is planning and handling this is they’ll do the count at the polling center level, they count the votes were cast for whomever regardless of whether they’re still running or not, and then in Kabul they’ll basically strike out any votes for candidates who have officially withdrawn in writing to the IEC. Because this is a two-round election, the winner needs to get more than 50% of the vote, someone needs to get more than 50% of the votes, in the first round to win. So, striking out those votes for candidates who have withdrawn, is actually significant, both from an election administration and a political standpoint.

SO, JUST TO BE CLEAR, IF A CANDIDATE WITHDRAWS HIS OR HER VOTES DON’T GET ADDED TO THE CANDIDATE THEY SUPPORT, THEY JUST BECOME INVALID. IS THAT RIGHT?

Right, Any ballots marked for a candidate who has officially withdrawn, is an invalid ballot. It doesn’t count as a vote. So, if candidate “X”, is trying to get the 50 percent, those votes don’t count as part of the total number of votes, the hundred percent.

OK. AND FINALLY WE’VE HEARD SOME REPORTS RECENTLY, BOTH TO OUR MISSION AND ALSO IN THE MEDIA OF VOTE BUYING AND MAYBE SOME OTHER FORMS OF FRAUD PRE-ELECTION, IS THIS SOMETHING THAT DI OBSERVERS ARE FOCUSING ON, AND HOW MUCH OF CONCERN SHOULD THIS BE?

This is definitely something we’ve heard about too, you know both within the media, and from sources on the ground here in Afghanistan. It’s clearly an area of concern. It does lead to the potential for fraud. The vote buying you kind of hear of on the retail level, like going to the market and buying a couple of registration cards. We can’t really be sure how widespread that is. I’d say that’s not the number one concern in terms of affecting the outcome of the election. It’s relatively difficult to get enough votes through that process, and it’s relatively expensive to swing the outcome of especially the presidential race. What might be more of a concern to us is officials, local leaders, political agents, or whomever, who have access to large numbers of voters registration cards, either through buying that has already happened or through illegitimate registration of people during the voter registration phase, you know, fake voters, or whatever. Those large blocks of voter cards have more potential to be a problem for the election than the kind of retail vote buying that goes on on the street.

SO HOW WOULD THAT WORK IN THE POLLING STATIONS, IF SAY SOME LOCAL LEADER HAS A THOUSAND VOTER REGISTRATION CARDS THAT ARE FRAUDULENT THAT HE OR SHE HAS IN HIS POSSESSION, HOW WOULD THAT TURN INTO A FRAUDULENT RESULT FROM THAT POINT CENTER ON ELECTION DAY?

The polling center procedures actually, you know, do have systems in place for preventing individual voters from voting twice. They have primarily, each voter is supposed to ink their fingers after they voted so they can’t go into another polling station and vote again with another voting card or with a same voting card.

So, that kind of individual double voting actually, there is a system for preventing that or deterring that at least. If somebody wants to really put in a bunch of fraudulent votes into a ballot box, they’re going to need either the cooperation or the coercion of the polling station officials to allow them to go in there and put in a bunch of fake ballots. So basically they have, say, a hundred voting cards in their possession, if they can get access to the ballot box, either by getting the cooperation of the officials, or stealing a ballot box, or whatever, then they can use those cards to fill out a hundred fake ballots, and they can write down the numbers on the voter registration cards, which are legitimate numbers those are legitimate voter registration cards, they just don’t correspondent to an actual voter. And the problem with that is that after the fact there’s no way to detect that kind of fraud. You have legitimate ballots filled out with legitimate voter registration numbers, and if there’s no observer around to see it happen, then those ballots are just going into a box, into a bag, then sent to Kabul, and it’s really tough to find out where they came from, whether there’s actual voters behind that mark on the ballot.

OK, SO, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The campaign period ends 48 hours before polls open on election day. So 7 am on Tuesday, JULY [sic] 18, which is about three, four days from now. The main candidates are definitely still campaigning hard throughout the country. We’ve seen number of rallies here in Kabul for the last few days. For us, we’ve got short term observers who have been arriving in country of the last couple of days, we’re going to be giving them briefings, we’re going to get them meeting with candidates and other officials, we’re going to get them out to, at this point, thirteen provinces, around the country, which we’re very proud of. We’re going to get people to some provinces where no other international observers are planning on going, so hopefully between us and the rest of international and domestic observers group we’re going to have close to, we’re going to have at least pretty widespread coverage of the country, not everywhere, but a lot more places than I think people were thinking a couple of months ago.

GREAT, THANKS VERY MUCH.

SO WHO’S RUNNING THIS ELECTION?

This election is actually interesting because it’s the first Afghan election since 2001 that is actually being run by Afghans themselves. In 2004 and 2005, the elections fell under the auspices of the UN. There was the Joint Election Management Body (JEMB), that took authority to organize and run the elections, and this time around the IEC is actually an Afghan government organization. The commissioners are appointed by the government and Afghans themselves are responsible for the running and the execution of the elections. One interesting exception to that is the Election Complaints Commission, which under the existing electoral law is still a body consisting of Afghan and international members and actually the chairman of the Election Complaints Commission (ECC) is a Canadian, which is fairly unique in the world. I don’t know that there are any other places where elections being run by a sovereign government have an internationally constituted election body overseeing them, at least partly.

WHAT’S THE ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN ALL THIS, THIS TIME?

The International community is still directly involved in the election to a large extent. The UNDP is providing technical assistance to the election commission with a large project, a couple hundred million dollar project, ranging from everything, from voter registration to assisting with printing and distributing of ballot papers. The US government also provided some support through US NGOs to provide technical assistance, so there’s still pretty heavy involvement from the international community in assisting the Afghan Election Commission. The difference this time around is that the IEC, the Afghan Independent Election Commission, is the body in charge, and have the final say on how this election get run.

WHAT’S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS ELECTION?

This election is extremely important for a few reasons. From an election management standpoint, as I said, this is the first election being run by Afghans themselves, so it’s basically a test on how well the Independent Election Commission can manage a complicated process like this. And then, obviously there are the political and security implications. We’re talking about a country that’s had ongoing security problems, that has a nascent political system that’s still developing, and how these elections go is going to be very important in determining how we move forward in terms of the political system and the security situation. Next year, 2010, are the parliamentary elections and hopefully the district council elections. So in a lot of ways, this is going to be a test run for those elections which are no more important, but in some ways more complicated because it involves more races around the country, and it will involve setting up district council races, which have not been held yet.

HOW DEMOCRATIC YOU THINK THIS ELECTION IS?

The framework under which these elections are being held actually conforms fairly well to international standards for elections. There are some areas in which you might want to see reforms, but overall it’s a fairly solid framework for how one would want to hold an election.

We’re going to be very interested in looking at how this election is executed. There are a lot of concerns being raised in the international community and the domestic community, and in the media about potential areas for fraud, or for irregularities, that are really going to determine how this election is viewed both domestically by political groups and by the public of Afghanistan and by the international community.

WHAT’S THE ROLE OF OBSERVERS IN THAT WHOLE PROCESS?

As observers, we’re going to try to be looking at a couple of things. We’ve been looking at the pre-election environment so the campaign period, how candidates can campaign, get their message out, speak to the public. We’ve been looking at media coverage, how that varies from candidate to candidate, whether there’s an environment where free speech and free association, free expression of ideas is allowed. For the election day itself, it’s a little more difficult, because there’s going to be voting going on in some six to seven thousand polling stations around the country, and how the voting is carried out in these places is going to be a big determinant of whether the election is accepted by the domestic and international communities.

FOR THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, WHAT DOES A CANDIDATE HAVE TO DO TO WIN?

So for the presidential elections there are, I think, something like 37 or 38 candidates, remaining in the field. If none of them gets more than 50 percent of the votes, then the top two will go on to a run-off election, which is tentatively scheduled to be held on October 1^st.

TELL US ABOUT DI’S ELECTION OBSERVATION MISSION?

At the end of June, Democracy International, DI, got a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to send a delegation to Afghanistan to observe the upcoming elections which are going to be held on August 20. The election is going to be for the president and the provincial councils in all the 34 provinces of the country. DI is a democracy and governance firm based in DC, and we’ve done this work previously, most recently in Pakistan last year where we fielded a delegation under a similar circumstances.

The goal of the delegation – the goal of any international election observation mission – is to travel to a country to assess the pre-electoral environment, to do interviews with election commissions, civil society groups, candidates, candidate reps, political parties, anyone who has an interest in or information to share about the election process, or the election environment.

So, right now, we’re about a month in, a little more than a month in. We’ve had a team on the ground since beginning of July. We fielded our first observers, long term observers around July 22, and we’ve actually deployed several of them to the field to areas outside of Kabul in the last week. For election day itself, we’re going to bring in an additional forty or so short term observers who will also be deployed to various areas in the country, to give us as much coverage as possible in terms of observing what’s going on, in as many parts of the country as possible.

Obviously it’s going to be impossible for a delegation of fifty five or sixty five people, especially internationals, to go everywhere in Afghanistan and see everything that’s going to happen in Afghanistan, but we’re pretty confident that we’d be able to deploy people to most parts of the country, well maybe not most parts of the country, but to many areas in the country and to get a comprehensive idea of what’s going on both pre-election, on election day, and in the post-election period.

WHAT IS SOME OF THE SPECIFIC THINGS THAT THE OBSERVERS ARE LOOKING FOR?

It covers a really wide range of issues, unfortunately we were not around for the voter registration process which in this context is a huge issue. Some percentage of Afghan citizens, and there’s really no way of knowing how many because there’s no way of knowing how many Afghan citizens there actually are, at least accurately.

But some percentage of them are unregistered, clearly. After the last election I think there are about twelve or thirteen million registered voters in the country with an estimated population of about 32 million people. Now a large percentage of that population is under the age of 18 or under the voting age, but still that leaves a large number of citizens who aren’t registered to vote. So, this time around, they had a very intense and well-funded voter registration process that occurred last fall through the winter and into early part of 2009.

Obviously DI wasn’t on the ground for that, but we’re collecting information on that process from the people who were there.

Other issues we’re looking at: the candidate registration process. Afghanistan is unique, I think, in the world, in that they have an election complaint commission chaired by internationals. And that’s a hold over from when the UN ran their election in 04 and 05. So for the candidate registration process, there’s a Challenge process in which someone can challenge the eligibly of a candidate to run for the office. And in the case of the presidential election, a few candidates were thrown out for various reasons, a number of provincial candidates have their candidacies declined or thrown out for a variety of reasons, ranging from involvement with militant groups, to more sort of technical problems like failure to resign a government post before running. Those are a couple issues – we’re also looking at access to the media, use of the media, use of government resources in campaigning, the campaign period in general, issues related to gender and women’s right to vote. Now on election day itself we’ll hopefully have people in as many polling stations as possible looking at the actual voting and vote counting process.

WHAT’S DI PROCESS AFTER THE ELECTION? WHAT GOES ON IN THE MISSION, WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT AND HOW DO THEY RELEASE THEIR FINDINGS?

Normally, on any election mission, there’s going to be a preliminary statement and a press conference, those statement and press conference being released sometime in the 2 to 3 days following the election. In Afghanistan, we’re still hoping to do that. The election commission is projecting they’ll have some sort of preliminary or tentative results within 48 to 72 hours. We, as a firm, I think we have a policy of not wanting to release much or too much information before the official results have been released. So we’re going to have to carefully measure what we say and when we say it. But, that preliminary statement will hopefully come on the first 2, 3 or 4 days after the election, and then most of our observers, our short term observers, will leave the country, and security permitting, we’ll keep a long term team on for several weeks to do more interviews, ask people how election day went, look into the post election complaint process, and release a final report, which will probably come several weeks or maybe a couple months after the election. One unique thing that DI is doing this time around, is that we have a pretty robust website, with a blog and multimedia capabilities, so we’re hoping to release a lot of information in real time or as close to real time as possible.

So in addition to the preliminary statement and the final report were going to be putting up updates as often as we can.