Afghanistan hits a deadlock again, halts presidential poll audit

A recounting of votes in the Afghan presidential elections, which was scheduled to begin on Saturday after several delays, has been put on hold again.

According to the BBC, the decision came despite late night talks between United States Secretary of State John Kerry and the two presidential candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani.

The current disagreement is over the process to deal with the ballot boxes that are found to contain invalid votes.

While Abdullah wants the ballot box to be thrown if some votes in the box are invalid, the United Nations wants to count as many valid votes as possible and discard only the ones that are invalid.

Both candidates have alleged electoral fraud. The impasse over the recounting of votes and poll fraud was sorted during a three day-visit by Kerry last month when both the candidates agreed to carry out an extensive poll audit but no resolutions has been reached so far.