An Examination of Afghanistan’s 2018 Wolesi Jirga Elections: Chaos, Confusion and Fraud

Abstract

This article’s primarily focus concerns Afghanistan’s ‘democratic’ electoral processes and procedures. Fraud and other critical aspects of the 2018 election for the Wolesi Jirga, Afghanistan’s lower house of parliament, are systematically assessed and official election data and results are examined in depth. As witnessed in earlier Wolesi Jirga elections, this legislative election was duplicitous and unrepresentative. By definition, a democratic legislature serves as the voice of a country’s population. Assessing the voting results in Kabul, the largest and most important province, can summarise the problems of the election. The leading ‘vote getter’ in the Kabul Province got a mere 2.0 per cent of the vote—11,158 out of 666,478 votes cast. Twenty-six of the elected Wolesi Jirga legislators received less than 1 per cent of the vote. Only 23.5 per cent of Kabuli voters voted for a winning candidate. Overall, this article paints a bleak picture of the state of democracy in Afghanistan. The already restricted Afghan environment is further hindered by operational mismanagement by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) throughout the electoral process. The single non-transferable voting (SNTV) system again proved to be a disaster resulting in the vast majority of Afghans voting for losing candidates and winning candidates receiving few votes.