The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC) will announce the preliminary list of candidates for parliamentary elections by Thursday midnight.
The commission will not select applications of those applicants whose documents do not comply with the law, head of the IEC Abdulbadi Sayyad said at an session on assessment of nominees’ documents.
“The commission will not facilitate those who have not prepared their documents according to the law. For instance, a candidate has not received the form to prove whether he committed any crime or a candidate whose supporters are less than the figure which has been stated in the law,” said Sayyad.
Based on the electoral calendar, the IEC should have announced the preliminary list of candidates for parliamentary elections on June 28, but electoral body said they received some applications late – which faced the process with a delay.
“When the open session is ended and the commission approves it, the system will decide about the fate of the candidates who will remain and who will be dropped from the list. We are trying to publish the list by 12am tonight,” said IEC commissioner Sayed Hafiz Hashemi. “We received documents of candidates from six provinces just yesterday,” he said.
Some electoral monitoring organizations expressed their reservation over the scrutiny of the nomination papers by the election commission.
“It is not known that whether a committee or a person has assessed these documents. Meanwhile, the assessment that we witnessed today was not a professional assessment,” said Soghra Saadat, spokeswoman to Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA).
IEC statistics show that 2,691 have filed nomination papers across Afghanistan to run for the parliament. Of those registered, 404 are the female candidates.
According to IEC, so far more than 7.3 million people have registered to vote in the upcoming elections.
The parliamentary and district councils’ elections will be held in October.
Source Tolonews