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Article: Re-rigging Hamid Karzai; Elections in Afghanistan.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- September 12, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The fraud-ridden election is an opportunity to shift power away from the flawed president
TO MOST people, ballot boxes containing a unanimity of votes for just one out of 36 candidates in an election might raise a suspicion of cheating. Not so Hamid Karzai. A bit of fraud is inevitable in any young democracy, he says, but Afghanistan is a tribal society where "people vote collectively"; it is not odd for everybody in a district to support him. The Afghan president says he will not only match his victory of 2004, when he won more than 54.5% of the vote, but surpass it. Indeed, the slow counting of the votes this week seemed likely to bear him out.
Yet ...