Afghan vote is peaceful but draws loud protests

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In schools and mosques, wearing suits and burkas, Afghans voted yesterday in the first presidential election, and did not suffer the widespread violence that officials had feared. But the ballot was thrown into doubt when candidates challenging interim President Hamid Karzai called the results invalid after many stations used the wrong ink to mark voters' thumbs.

Less than an hour after the polls opened, voters complained that the ink used to mark their thumbs, to prevent them from voting twice, had rubbed off. By midafternoon, all 15 of Karzai's opponents gathered at a candidate's house and said they would boycott the election because of the potential for fraud.

"Any government as a result of this election is illegitimate," Abdul Satar Serat, a candidate with a modest following, told reporters outside his home. "We will not accept the results."

Shortly after the problem surfaced, officials with the joint United Nations-Afghan body that ran the $200 million election said stopping the ballot would be unfair to millions who turned out.

The Joint Electoral Management Body, whose Afghan members were appointed by Karzai, will rule later on the election's legitimacy.

Karzai, who was named interim president with US backing in 2001, declared the election "free and fair," and called on his opponents to respect Afghans who waited hours during dust storms in the south and snow in the north.

Karzai is expected to win, but must take more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff between the two top candidates. Counting could take four weeks, as ballots must be delivered from remote areas.

The mixup cast a shadow over an election that otherwise appeared to go relatively smoothly. In and around Kabul, a few poll workers and observers could be overheard prodding voters toward certain candidates, but were quickly scolded by colleagues. Poll workers bent the rules of secrecy to help illiterate voters find the box they wanted to check, but did not seem to abuse the role -- at least not in the view of a reporter who visited a dozen sites.

There was scattered violence, mostly in the southern province of Uruzgan, a Taliban stronghold where an ambush killed three police officers escorting ballot boxes. Earlier, US warplanes dropped bombs to kill 24 suspected rebels, according to US and Afghan authorities who were quoted by the Associated Press.

Afghan and international forces said they had thwarted several attacks, including stopping a fuel-truck bomb headed for Kandahar that could have killed hundreds.

But the most wide-reaching blemish on the vote came from a mundane mistake. After many people were able to obtain more than one voter-registration card over the summer, election officials had played up plans to mark voters with indelible ink to assuage the public's fears of fraud. But it appears some poll workers used regular ink.

Many voters were dismayed. At one polling station, a school in a neighborhood of rickety apartment buildings, people vented anger at what they called a UN betrayal.

After voting at another polling station in eastern Kabul, Wahidullah Hamdard, an administrator for the UN landmine agency, brandished a thumb that had no trace of ink.

"The ink cleaned off with soap," he said. "Now how many times will some people vote? What are you going to do about it?"

Poll workers with only a few days' training were presented with many different types of ink for different purposes. There were indelible markers for voters' thumbs and ordinary markers for marking ballots. There were pots of invisible ink that turned purple on contact -- an alternative way to mark thumbs -- that looked much like pots of purple ink for stamping used ballots. A spokesman for the Joint Electoral Management Board, Aykut Tavsel, said the numerous methods appeared to have caused confusion.

"Now we see the mistake, we see what we could have done better," he said. "It was a silly little mistake, but one that had impact."

It was unclear how wide the impact would be. Holes were punched in voters' registration cards after they had cast their ballots, so double-voting would require both washing off the ink and having more than one card.

But the ink confusion appeared to have been widespread, with poll workers offering a different explanation of the correct marking method at nearly every station. The number of registered voters exceeds the estimated voting population by more than a million.

The success of the election, nearly three years after the United States ousted the Taliban regime for harboring Osama bin Laden, is crucial to the Bush administration's record in the war on terror.

Doubts about Karzai's legitimacy could undercut his efforts to establish a central government strong enough to establish the rule of law over militia factions, Taliban insurgents, and a growing opium economy.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, UN envoy Jean Arnault and other diplomats were said to be meeting with the protesting candidates last night.

In a statement, Khalilzad cautioned the candidates not to "raise allegations of wrongdoing intended solely to paralyze the democratic process."

The strongest challenger is Yunus Qanooni, one of many militia leaders who helped the United States defeat the Taliban but whose power undermines the central government. Human rights groups warned that Afghans widely felt compelled to vote according to their local leader's desires.

It was impossible to judge yesterday if that fear was at play. From the bustling capital to tiny villages, voters arrived with an air of gravity, excitement, and sometimes confusion.

"To tell you honestly, I didn't sleep all night," said Abdul Rashid Sahmet, 54, an Afghan National Bank employee who voted just after 7 a.m. at a high school in western Kabul. "I wanted to be the first in my polling station."

Voters picked their way through rubble inside the gutted, windowless school, which had been bombed repeatedly during the capital's many battles. A polling site chief, Homayoun Hassel, who normally teaches literature in a makeshift tent outside, summed up what a successful election would mean: "The people will select the president, instead of him coming through power and force like before." When one woman admitted that she didn't know whom to choose, the woman giving out ballots whispered, "Qanooni, Qanooni."

But Homayoun Ahmedi, 22, a poll observer for candidate Latif Pedran, a poet who had recently returned from exile in France, told the poll worker to stop.

Women, who make up 41 percent of registered voters, cast ballots at, female-staffed stations. Many wore burkas that they flipped up once inside, to show that their faces matched their voting cards.

On the eastern edge of Kabul, women from the nomadic Kuchai herding tribe arrived adorned with nose rings, as well as bright purple and red robes. Bibigul, 55, could not read the ballot, or recognize the photographs of each candidate next to the boxes to be checked.

"All I know is I want Karzai," said Bibigul, who like many Afghans goes by one name. Shakila, 50, a school principal and poll worker, shrugged sheepishly as she pointed out Karzai's face.

"We have to help them," she said, looking the other way as two Kuchai women helped another fill out her ballot.

"Our children are dirty. We are poor," said Bibigul, 55, showing off hands dirty from milking cows and cutting hay. She said Karzai -- a fellow ethnic Pashtun -- "will help us get a permanent home, and a mosque."

In dry fields further east, in a village of mud houses, Fahima Amin, a teacher from Kabul, was running a men's polling station in Budhhok with a stern hand. Many rural stations were staffed partly with literate people from the city.

Observers from the parties of Qanooni and another candidate backed by a rival warlord had tried to get voters to line up according to their chosen candidate. "I wouldn't let them," Amin said.

Next she faced a whiskerless boy, Abdelhudood, saying he was below voting age. "You are not 18," she said as she confiscated his card. He said he had been told to vote for Qanooni. "I want him to be the king of Afghanistan," he said.

In Kalakan, a village in the Shomali Plain north of Kabul, where Tajik militia leaders like Qanooni are strong, women streamed to the shrine of a local saint to vote. Nearly all said they were voting for Qanooni. Asked how they had decided, they said they had "asked the other women."

Said Farhad, a district administrator, said he had to work hard to persuade husbands to let their wives leave their houses to vote.

Sitting in the village square, Abdelghani, 40, a farmer, said women have the right to choose their own candidates. "But they're mostly illiterate," he added.

Women who don't know the names or faces of the candidates tended to ask their husbands how to vote, said Said Nazil, a local government worker.

Globe correspondent Victoria Burnett contributed to this report.