Word: runoff
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...legitimate authority. Unfortunately, the recent withdrawal of Abdullah Abdullah from the Afghan presidential race represents a poor decision on Abdullah’s part and a step back on Afghanistan’s road to recovery. Abdullah’s decision not to challenge incumbent Hamid Karzai in a runoff election can be explained as a principled protest of the widespread fraud present in the electoral proceedings, but it also means the controversial Karzai’s legitimacy as a ruler will not be popularly affirmed, but instead ordained by electoral officials suspected of corruption and fraud...
...major reforms will be a switch to instant-runoff voting, the method currently utilized by the Undergraduate Council, which involves ranking candidates in order of preference...
This will replace the old system that held runoff elections until one candidate captured a majority of the votes...
...Taliban, of course, and its call for a boycott of the poll was enforced by threat of death. But whether out of fear, political choice or sheer indifference, 12 million voters - representing 70% of the electorate, compared with just 30% in 2004 - stayed away from the ballot stations. A runoff election was expected to see an even smaller turnout. (See pictures of Afghanistan's mock election...
...Even as it pressed for a runoff, the U.S. seemed to recognize its irrelevance. By many accounts, its insistence on a second vote was intended as leverage to press Karzai into accepting a unity government with Abdullah rather than to actually go through with the poll. But Karzai called Washington's bluff, insisting on a second round he was confident of winning. Meanwhile, Abdullah, claiming that he'd be cheated again and probably recognizing that he was never likely to win even a clean election against Karzai, made clear his intention to boycott the runoff early on. The runoff...