Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fellow voter Golalai Khan, 29, agrees, saying, "We need to vote, as it says on TV that if you don't vote, then your favorite candidate will lose." Elsewhere in the violent south, voters didn't turn out at all. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' new offensive in Afghanistan...
...Materials had arrived late, and an hour after the polls were supposed to open, volunteers were still struggling to fasten shut the white plastic ballot boxes. Zahir, a 29-year-old employee at the Ministry of Finance, fumes as he stands in line. "Today everyone in Afghanistan wants to select their favorite candidates, but unfortunately they are not optimistic," he says. "Look at this place: it's chaos. Yet we are in central Kabul - what hope do we have for the rural provinces...
...intimidation on the roads forced the provincial government to close all polling stations. As a last resort, soldiers from the Afghan army started going door to door with ballots, a practice that could easily be mistaken as a coercive tactic in favor of the current government. International and independent Afghanistan observers worry that the lack of voters could open the way to fraud: corrupt officials might use the names and registration numbers of voters who didn't turn up with little fear of being caught. And with such a low turnout, even clean-winning candidates are unlikely to have...
...Coming up with a clear national picture is difficult, says Ken Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute, which has sent a large contingent of election observers to Afghanistan. "If there is any trend in what we are witnessing, it is a lot of different types of elections. So that is going to be the challenge - looking at how all these areas voted and analyzing the results...
...station in Kabul, no women had voted, and at another, just dozens turned up, compared with hundreds of men. This raises alarm bells. Women registered to vote in higher numbers than men this year, which many observers had found hard to believe in a traditional society like Afghanistan. Many suspect that men falsely registered fictitious wives and daughters in order to collect extra voting cards that could in turn be used to stuff ballot boxes. Few of the women's stations were monitored, which raises further questions. "I think people know there will be fraud, but what...