Afghan election extended another day

(Image credit: Hoshang Hashimi/Getty Images)

last updated 21 October 2018

Afghanistan's parliamentary election was extended for a second day Sunday after Saturday's voting was marred by violence, technical difficulties, and, in some places, polling stations that did not open at all.

This is the first such election since 2010, and it employs a biometric tracking system to avoid fraud that has not been widely tested. "More than 25 percent of the [voting] centers we observed were not opened," reported Naeem Ayubzada of Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan. "We also observed technical challenges with 32 percent of the biometric systems not working in 22 percent of the polling centers. Also, 9 percent of the centers were not equipped with the biometric system."

The Taliban, which remains powerful particularly in rural regions, has told Afghanistan's 8.8 million eligible voters to stay away from the polls, but despite these obstacles, more than 3 million voted Saturday.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.