Afghanistan's top 2 presidential candidates have claimed victory — and ballots are still coming in

Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission is still gathering votes from Saturday's presidential election, and results are not expected to be finalized until November, but both incumbent President Ashraf Ghani and his top challenger Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah are already claiming victory, Reuters reports.

Abdullah reportedly said at a press conference Monday that he won more than half of the votes, which would mean there would be no need for a runoff vote between the two top candidates. Likewise, Ghani's team is arguing that the information they've received so far indicates the sitting president received somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the vote.

While no official count has been tallied as ballot boxes continue to be transferred from more remote areas of the country to the capital, Kabul, the public declarations by both candidates reportedly could hint at a revival of a crisis that overshadowed the last presidential election in Afghanistan in 2014. That contest also came down to Ghani and Abdullah, and the dispute over who won the election led to months of turmoil.

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Abdullah has also already said he will only accept votes filed with biometric voter verification, which could be a problem after technical difficulties with scanning machines throughout the country left the commission with no choice but to count votes without scanning fingerprints. Read more at Reuters.