AYNSO is committed to lead an election observation mission for its observers in order to monitor and oversee the upcoming elections. AYNSO’s previous activities and commitment has brought a tremendous amount of experience for doing so, as AYNSO has done a monitoring mission of the 2014 Presidential elections and has since cultivated relationships with Afghan political and community leaders in every province through work with issue-based coalitions.
Ensuring fairness, transparency and credibility requires more than observing voters at the polls on Election Day. To provide the proper context for observers, AYNSO has a plan to deploy its observers in advance of the election to observe electoral & voting preparations. AYNSO’s team has already met with election stakeholders, government and international officials, campaign representatives, election administration coordinators and civil society members.
AYNSO has also integrated a monitoring component into its election observation efforts. With having volunteer committed individuals and teams throughout the country, the observers include a mix of men and women, young and old who volunteered to monitor polling centers in their provinces previously too. AYNSO’s observers were instrumental in monitoring locations inaccessible to international observers as security concerns and restricted mobility prevented international observers from witnessing the opening and closing of polling centers.
This report focuses on multiple topics prior to the upcoming October’s elections day. It includes some key analysis of IEC’s so far activities for conduction of the aforementioned elections such as vote day, international community’s stance upon progress of the electoral activities, elections calendar, voter registry, security circumstances Polling centers’ assessment, discussion about can Afghanistan hold the upcoming elections and controversies, and some useful recommendations at the end.
One of the major discussions of this report is the electoral system of Afghanistan and the reasons whether it should be changed or not; with considering the involvements of the NUG too. One of the key components of this discussion is the Afghan Political Parties, that do not see their desired results from the current electoral system. The Afghan Political Parties had put their struggles and efforts to convert the Single Non-transferable Voting system (SNTV) to Multi-Dimensional Representation (MDR) and had also published their press release and had meetings with the NUG and IEC but still in vain. The reason that the NUG provides is that this conversion of the system would be time consuming which we do not have that much as needed.
On the other side, some other political parties also demanded the bio-metrication of the citizens to avoid fraudulence in the upcoming elections but the IEC and NUG are not in the position to do so due to lack of time resources and other resources too.AYNSO’s Electoral Findings & Monitoring Report