ON the day before elections, the streets of Kabul are eerily quiet. Groups of men no larger than two or three tramp down empty streets. A market stands half-open, selling essentials like meat, fruits, vegetables, and toiletries. And security checkpoints stop passersby, asking questions, checking IDs. The repressed uncertainty that has marred the last few weeks reveals itself in the silence that seems to hang heavy in the air: No one really knows what will happen on Friday when Afghans cast their vote for a new president.

It will be the fifth time that Afghanistan will be voting since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, and the third time that they will be electing a president. The election is seen as a crucial turning point: Nato/Isaf troops are set to withdraw, or substantially reduce, their presence in the next few months, and a two-year term limit means incumbent Hamid Karzai, the face of post-Taliban Afghanistan, will not be running this year. But, Afghans might not know what the turning point looks like: A combination of a wide-open race and election irregularities means that it could take several days, or months, before a clear, and widely-accepted winner emerges.

With the final candidate requiring more than 50 per cent of the final vote, the election is expected to go to a second round. Three of the eight candidates vying for the top position are expected to split the bulk of the vote into three substantial slices. Dr Zalmay Rasool, a former foreign minister and national security advisor to Hamid Karzai, might run off with the vote that would have gone to Karzai: He is a Pakhtun who is said to have the backing of the soon-to-be former president. The former ophthalmologist, Abdullah Abdullah, who ran against Karzai in 2009, proved to be a serious competition in the last election. Seen as a Tajik, though he is half-Pakthun, some say that he will not have the support of the Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group (though some say that votes are not always ethnically driven.) And Ashraf Ghani who finished fourth in 2009, has risen to become a serious threat to the other two candidates, after picking Abdul Rashid Dostum as his running mate. An Uzbek leader from northern Afghanistan, Dostum is accused of atrocious war crimes, potentially resulting in a small loss of votes for Ghani. On the other hand, Ghani now has, as he calls it, “a winning ticket”: Dostum has brought in the Uzbek vote.

Threats and irregularities

According to the Afghanistan Analyst Network’s Martine van Bijlert, a wide range of election irregularities might result in a fair bit of uncertainty about the final result. According to research carried out by the AAN, the maximum number of eligible voters — all Afghans over 18 — is around 13.5 million, but a total of 21 million cards are floating around in this election.

“Even if every single person of voting age had acquired a voter card — which is clearly not the case — there would be at least 7.5 million additional voter cards floating around, not linked to real voters,” says Ms. Van Bijlert in a report issued on the AAN website. “I would even say: though in practice the number could be as high as 10 million — or higher”, she adds.

The irregularities do not end there. On the day of the vote, everything from security threats to weather and inaccessibility can mean that some polling stations will be closed on the day of the vote, potentially disenfranchising voters. If polling stations are closed in areas where a candidate expects to get a fair share of the vote, the results could prove to be even more controversial. Threats of attacks has already prompted the government to shut down 10 per cent of the polling stations around the country, and launch almost 200,000 security personnel to patrol the rest. And fears of widespread fraud–stuffing ballot boxes with votes–are also being closely watched. In the last presidential election, up to one million votes were disqualified.

“If the electoral authorities deal with the fraud well, it does not have to derail the process. But if there is a lot of confusion about how they deal with it, and whether it is fair or not, there is going to be a lot of noise around the elections,” says Martine van Biljert.