Afghanistan presidential poll results announced after 5-month delay, Ashraf Ghani secures seat for second term

After a delay of around five months, Afghanistan's election commission on Tuesday declared incumbent president Ashraf Ghani as the winner of polls conducted in September 2018.

After weeks of assessments, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Monday completed the partial audit of the 300,000 disputed votes, a decision which was made by the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission after weeks of assessments, Tolo News reported.

The slim win gives Ghani another five-year term as president.

Based on the preliminary results that were announced late last December, Ghani was narrowly declared the winner while Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah got 39 per cent of a total of over 1.8 million votes.

According to New York Times, the vote, held last September amid a record number of Taliban attacks intended to destabilise the election, had itself been repeatedly delayed and marred by uncertainty as a peace deal between the US and the Taliban over the future of Afghanistan was nearing finalisation. But President Donald Trump terminated the talks just weeks before the election was expected, opening the way for voting to proceed.

Now, with those negotiations resumed and a conditional date announced for the signing of an agreement between the United States and the Taliban, the fresh political crisis risks derailing that fragile process, which was expected to open the way for negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban over the country's political future.

However, opposition parties immediately protested the result, threatening a full-blown political crisis on the cusp of a United States peace deal with the Taliban.

Nearly one million of the initial 2.7 million votes were purged owing to irregularities, meaning the election saw by far the lowest turnout of any Afghan poll.

Ultimately, only 1.8 million votes were counted - a tiny number given Afghanistan's estimated population of 35 million and a total of 9.6 million registered voters.