5 February 2020

Announcement of the preliminary and final results of the 2019 election was contingent upon the final work of ECC, and finally as of yesterday, this commission managed to openly share on its works.

For over a month, all election stakeholders were desperately waiting to know about ECC's final decision; however what ECC presented yesterday clearly did not meet what was legitimately expected of them, which haplessly compounded the obscurity of the overall 2019 electoral big picture, owing to the fact that ECC's decision was made while neglecting some important parts of the election law, bills and procedures which unnecessarily prolonged the process once again.

ECC had contradicting views on the electoral appeals which they explained under the title of "Difference between biometric and non-biometric votes from 1-5" in their yesterday's press conference. Validating the 1-5 vote difference is against the Afghan constitution. ECC's decision on special audit of 10% and 15% of the two categories of votes is completely illegal and cannot provide any rational solution for the existing problems. TEFA embraces ECC's decision on the 137630 suspicious votes: but the mechanism for the audit that is based on sampling method is entirely irrational and illegal too.

Special audit of 102012 votes that were casted outside the polling timeframe, recount of of 298 polling stations with non-biometric votes, and audit of those polling stations that have more than 6-vote difference between the result sheet and biometric data are all ways to deceive the public and lead the process to an avoid.

TEFA (Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan) strongly believes that ECC's work is incomplete and therefore must work neck to neck with IEC in the audit process to make sure their efforrts yield their and the election stakeholders' desired outcome.

Download statement here: TEFA's press release on the long-awaited completion of the 2019 Presidential electoral complaints adjudication process