Election success

last updated 8 January 2015

Kabul

For the first time in decades, Afghans this week flocked to the polls to elect a new parliament. Largely ignoring Taliban threats of attacks on election day, voters cast ballots in schools, mosques, and at mobile, donkey-borne polling stations. Police reported only a dozen minor incidents. Since ballots must be counted by hand, it will be weeks before voters learn which of the 5,000 candidates won the 249 seats in the lower house. President Hamid Karzai called the election a “day of self-determination for the Afghan people, after 30 years of wars, interventions, occupations, and misery.” Turnout was around 50 percent, well below the 70 percent turnout for the vote that elected Karzai last October.