Karzai’s takeover of election fraud watchdog raises concerns

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has given himself control over the election fraud watchdog whose rulings during last year’s presidential election affected his results more than any other candidate.

In a decree issued last week, Karzai gave himself the powers to appoint all five members of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), the independent election watchdog that ruled more than a million ballots in 2009, most of them for Karzai, were fraudulent.

Jean MacKenzie, an independent Kabul-based journalist with the online news agency GlobalPost, says that it was the ECC “that actually pushed for the investigation into fraud and pushed for a runoff, which ultimately did not happen.”