Election Monitor Claims 1M Tainted Karzai Votes [1]
Afghan Showdown Adds Pressure to Obama Strategy Decision
By Chris Cuomo, Nick Schifrin and Devin Dwyer | ABC News [1]
More than 1 million votes - most of them for Afghan President Hamid Karzai - were thrown out by election monitors in the disputed presidential election, a decision that the Afghan president has already indicated he will reject.
The ruling by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission would reduce the president's total from the 54 percent he has claimed to 48.3 percent. Anything under 50 percent is supposed to trigger a runoff between Karzai and his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah.
Over the weekend, Afghan election officials indicated they would not accept the possibility of a second vote.
Democracy International reported that the EEC has determined that 1.3 million votes were fraudulent, and about 1 million of those tainted votes were for Karzai. Another 200,000 votes for Abdullah were also thrown out, with the remainder for a handful of other candidates.
Those figures were confirmed to ABC News by election officials. Read more [1].