KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s political crisis deepened on Monday, with President Hamid Karzai hesitating to accept an international audit that stripped him of nearly a million votes, requiring a runoff with his top challenger.
A panel of United Nations-appointed experts issued findings for the first time on Monday showing that the fraud was so pervasive that Mr. Karzai had not won the Aug. 20 election outright, according to foreign and Afghan officials in the capital, Kabul.
The findings are a defining moment for Mr. Karzai, who initially received 54 percent of the vote, and believes he is the rightful winner. They place him in direct conflict with his main backer, the United States, and threaten to pitch the country into a major constitutional crisis, should he decide to reject them altogether.
The Obama administration registered its concern. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a top Obama ally and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, made an unplanned stop in Kabul on Monday night, and met Mr. Karzai in the presidential palace, “to continue his discussions and consultations,” according to a spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Kabul.
The special audit committee, the Electoral Complaints Commission, invalidated nearly a third of all ballots cast for Mr. Karzai, according to a New York Times analysis of the preliminary data. More precisely, 28 percent of Mr. Karzai’s 3,093,000 votes were discarded due to fraud, the analysis showed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
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