European Union election observers said today that one in three votes cast for President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan’s presidential elections were faked with the independent watchdog condoning the massive fraud, The Times reports.

Around 1.1 million votes in favour of Karzai met Afghanistan’s electoral fraud criteria, as well as 300,000 cast for Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival.

If the suspect votes were excluded Karzai’s total share of the vote would fall to 47 per cent and a second round run off in the presidential election would be triggered, the observers found.

The findings indicate that a quarter of the estimated 6 million votes in the Afghan election should have triggered fraud alerts but only a fraction are being investigated.

The EU team accused Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission of ignoring their own rules on identifying and eliminating suspect votes and of sanctioning the fraud.

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