Evidence of election rigging in AfghanistanExclusive footage obtained by the Guardian of ballot papers pre-marked for Hamid Karzai that were seized by monitors. The ballots appear to be stamped with the monitors' seal and ready to cast. The monitors filmed then destroyed the papers to stop them being used.

Taliban militants cut off the ink-stained fingers of two Afghan voters in the militant south during the presidential election, the country's top election monitoring group said today.

Two voters who had dipped their index fingers in purple ink – a fraud prevention measure – were attacked in Kandahar province shortly after voting on Thursday, according to Nader Nadery, the head of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan.

Rumours that militants would cut off voters' ink-stained fingers spread before the vote following threats from the Taliban.

Nadery said his group also saw widespread problems with election officials pressuring people to vote for certain candidates. Election monitors also saw voters carrying boxes of voter cards to polling sites, he said, allowing them to vote multiple times. There were also problems with underage voting and election officials being ejected from polling stations by representatives of candidates.

Western powers yesterday rushed to declare Afghanistan's presidential elections a success despite evidence of irregularities and violence on polling day and growing uncertainty about whether the vote would return a credible result.

Both the leading candidates, Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, declared they had won Thursday's poll, generating concerns of a full-blown dispute. Election officials warned that it would take several days to determine the result and the extent to which voting had been marred by corruption and low voter turnout.

Last night Barack Obama described the election as "an important step forward" in attempts by Afghans to take control of their future. Referring to attempts by the Taliban to derail the democratic process, he said: "Even in the face of this brutality, millions of Afghans exercised the right to choose their leaders and determine their own destiny. I believe that the future belongs to those that want to build, not those who want to destroy."

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general, said the poll was a "clear demonstration that the Afghan people want democracy, they want freedom and reject terrorism".

Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, said the Taliban had "utterly failed to disrupt these elections", despite a day of clashes. Other western diplomats were also bullish about a poll they said could have been "far worse" in terms of Taliban attacks. US military officials have already qualified the vote as a reasonable success.

Democracy and rights groups offered a more sober assessment. The Washington-based International Republican Institute, said: "Unfortunately, such issues as lower turnout, fraud and abuse of state resources brought these elections to a lower standard than the 2004 and 2005 Afghan elections."

Human Rights Watch also questioned whether "one of the most violent days witnessed in Afghanistan in the last eight years" could be described as a success.

Rachel Reid, an HRW researcher in Afghanistan, said the claims would "not ring true" for Afghans living in the south and east, where Taliban attacks were most severe. "They deserve an honest assessment … If international standards are dropped, there risks being a serious credibility gap, which will only serve to increase disillusionment with the efforts to create a democracy."

A senior Nato envoy cautioned against being too quick to welcome results that could turn sour if examples of mass fraud were detected. Western powers with more than 60,000 troops in Afghanistan are eager to avoid the elections being deemed a sham or a muddle, compounding a worsening security situation in which dozens of foreign troops are dying each month. The post-election uncertainty is not helping to calm tension. The Independent Election Commission said today it would not publish any official data until Tuesday.

Glenn Cowan, an observer from Democracy International, said the delay was "probably a mistake". "Almost all elections add somewhat to political tension and this one is not different," he said. "The best way to relive that tension is to provide information to people about an already uncertain election."

That uncertainty has stemmed from three principal factors: violence, intimidation of voters and candidates, and allegations of fraud. The election complaints commission said it had received around 120 complaints so far, mostly relating to allegations of voter fraud, intimidation of voters and ballot-box stuffing, but the main candidates were unwilling to criticise the process, with Abdullah saying the vote had been "quite good".

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

Skip to next paragraph

Related

Times Topics: Tom Ridge | John Ashcroft | Donald H. Rumsfeld

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (100) »

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”

“Given those facts,” Mr. Urbahn said, “it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

Mr. Urbahn said “the storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense.”

Mr. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Mr. Ridge’s account. “Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Mr. Bush’s homeland security adviser, said that “there was a fulsome debate” about the threat level but that “the politics of it were not ever a factor.”

Mr. Ridge’s book, called “The Test of Our Times” and due out Sept. 1 from Thomas Dunne Books, is the latest by a Bush adviser to disclose internal disagreements and establish distance from an unpopular administration. Mr. Ridge complains that he was never invited to National Security Council meetings, that Mr. Rumsfeld would rarely meet with him and that the White House pressured him to include a justification for the Iraq war in a speech.

He also writes that he lobbied unsuccessfully before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to replace Michael D. Brown as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and that the White House killed his proposal to open a homeland security regional office in New Orleans.

The most sensational assertion was the pre-election debate in 2004 about the threat level, first reported by U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Ridge writes that the bin Laden tape alone did not justify a change in the nation’s security posture but describes “a vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion” on Oct. 30 to do so.

“There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None,” he writes. “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’ Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president’s approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level.”

Mr. Ridge provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion. Until now, he has denied politics played a role in threat levels. Asked by Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times if politics ever influenced decisions on threat warnings, he volunteered to take a lie-detector test. “Wire me up,” Mr. Ridge said, according to Mr. Lichtblau’s book, “Bush’s Law.” “Not a chance. Politics played no part.”

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on August 21, 2009, on page A19 of the New York edition.

I wondered where Blair got the idea from.

Voters wash ink from their fingers using detergent outside Naderia high school in Kabul. Photograph: Jon Boone

The main safeguard against fraud in today's elections in Afghanistan has failed at some polling stations in the capital, as millions of Afghans headed out to vote.

Hours after polls opened at 7am, members of the Abdullah Abdullah campaign found they were able to remove the supposedly indelible ink that election workers put on the fingertips of people who have cast their ballot.

The ink is meant to help stop double voting, which election officials fear could be widespread, with as many as 3m illegal voting cards believed to be in circulation.

By washing their fingers with a domestic detergent, half a dozen voters at Naderia high school in Kabul cleaned the mark from their fingers while Abdullah was voting inside. A local journalist working for the Guardian removed the ink from his finger in just a couple of minutes.

Jon Boone reports from Kabul as voters go to the polls
Link to this audio

It is difficult to underestimate the embarrassment this will cause election organisers after a failure to buy the correct ink for the 2004 poll led to widespread multiple voting. The so-called ink scandal of 2004 caused fury among many voters and election organisers vowed it would never happen again.

In a recent attempt to bolster confidence in the election, the local UN chief Kai Eide invited journalists to watch him attempt to remove ink from his finger with a range of domestic cleaners.

Aleem Siddique, a UN spokesman in Kabul, said he could not comment on reports of the ink failing but said the indelible marking was "just one of the many measures in place designed to stop voter fraud". He said the presence of hundreds of thousands of observers working for individual campaigns and for the UN and the Independent Election Commission would ensure the election was fair.

Kamaludin Nazami, an engineer and Abdullah campaign official, said the ink problem was also being reported in south Kabul and in Herat.

The campaign team of another presidential candidate, Ashraf Ghani, said they had seen many people cleaning their right index finger. "It's completely delible," said a spokeswoman for the campaign.

She said she was more concerned about reports from the south that ballot box stuffing began last night in insecure areas.

"They know they can do this [ballot stuffing] because no one is going to go to these sorts of areas to check up on it," the spokeswoman said. "This wouldn't matter if just one of the safeguards worked — if the ink stuck, if polling stations were secure and if people had not been given more than one voter card each. But with all three of them so compromised, people can abuse the process."

In Kandahar city, Haji Padshah, a tribal elder, told the Guardian there had been overnight tampering with election material in the southern province.

Widespread fraud meant huge numbers of voting cards were issued in the name of non-existent people during the electoral registration process this year.

An Afghan policeman guards a polling station in Kabul. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Afghan journalists have rejected a government order not to report attacks or violence on election day, saying the ban would stifle press freedoms that were supposed to have returned after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

On the eve of the country's presidential election, Taliban violence has escalated with two suicide bombings against Nato troops, rocket fire on the presidential compound and an armed assault on a bank. Militants have threatened to attack polling stations tomorrow.

Fearing that coverage of such violence would deter people from voting, the government issued two decrees. The foreign ministry has banned all broadcasts of information about attacks while polls are open and the interior ministry has told reporters to keep away from the scene of any trouble.

"We have taken this decision in the national interest of Afghanistan to encourage people and raise their morale to come out and vote," Siamak Herawi, a spokesman for the president, Hamid Karzai, told Reuters.

It is unclear how effective the ban has been. Several attacks are rumoured to have taken place in Kabul today but were not officially reported.

Many representatives of Afghanistan's lively local media have said the prohibition violates freedom of the press. Rahimullah Samander, head of the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan, said: "We will not obey this order. We are going to continue with our normal reporting and broadcasting of news."

Samander said he refused to obey the reporting ban when a presidential spokesman told him about it.

When there are rumours of violence, "the first thing they do is turn on their radios or TVs, or go on the internet to read news", Samander told the Associated Press. "If the people aren't able to find information, it will be very difficult for them to participate in the election. If there is, for example, an attack on a highway going to a polling station, the people should know about it. It may be dangerous for them to use that highway."

Fahim Dashti, the editor of the English-language Kabul Weekly newspaper, called the demand "a violation of media law". He said the constitution protected freedom of speech.

"If some huge attack occurs, of course we are obliged to cover it," he said.

Although the English version of the foreign ministry's decree banning reporting spoke of a "request", the version in Dari, one of Afghanistan's official languages, said reporting on violence during the election would be "strictly forbidden".

Rachel Reid, the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said freedom of expression was enshrined in the Afghan constitution. The head of the Afghan Independent Journalists' Association (AIJA) said the decrees would not stop Afghan and foreign journalists providing information to the public during the crucial election period.

"It shows the weakness of the government and we condemn such moves to deprive people from accessing news," Samander said.

Taliban militants have vowed to disrupt the election. Authorities fear that reports of violence on election day could intimidate those wanting to vote and damage the credibility of the result.

Afghanistan has ordered all journalists not to report incidents of violence during tomorrow's presidential election amid fears that such coverage will deter people from voting.

Two decrees were issued, one from the foreign ministry banning all broadcasts of information about violence while polls were open, and the other from the interior ministry requiring reporters to keep away from the scene of any attacks.

Although the English version of the foreign ministry's decree spoke of a "request", the version in Dari, one of Afghanistan's official languages, said reporting on violence during the election would be "strictly forbidden".

"We have taken this decision in the national interest of Afghanistan in order to encourage people and raise their morale to come out and vote," Siamak Herawi, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, told Reuters.

"This decision will control the negative impact of the media. If something happens, this will prevent them from exaggerating it, so that people will not be frightened to come out and vote."

It was unclear how the government intended to enforce the ban and Rachel Reid, the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said freedom of expression is enshrined in the Afghan constitution. The head of the Afghan Independent Journalists' Association (AIJA) said the decrees would not stop Afghan and foreign journalists from providing information to the public during the crucial election period.

"It shows the weakness of the government and we condemn such moves to deprive people from accessing news," Rahimullah Samander said.

Taliban militants have vowed to disrupt the election and authorities fear reports of violence on election day could intimidate those wanting to vote and damage the credibility of any result.

A suicide car bomber killed eight people and wounded more than 50 in Kabul yesterday, one of several attacks countrywide. Dozens of journalists were on the scene within minutes of the blast. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, has called on Afghans to boycott the vote and one commander has reportedly warned villagers in the south where the Taliban are strongest that voters found with indelible ink would have their fingers cut off.

Young people in Kabul say how they would change their country if they were president Link to this video

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the surge in violence from the Taliban reflected a deliberate campaign to intimidate voters ahead of the election. Clinton told reporters at the state department yesterday that the Taliban hope their attacks will create a climate of fear that will keep people away from the ballot boxes.