High Afghan Vote Counts Don't Predict Democracy

by John Hickman

Something was conspicuously missing from the comments made by public officials and opinion makers in the mainstream news media about the October 9th presidential election in Afghanistan. Amid the chorus of congratulation there was no discussion whether the election was sufficiently free and fair to reflect the popular will in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the single most positive assessment came from President Bush, who claimed that "we've helped establish a democracy" in Afghanistan at a [Pete] Coors for Senate Luncheon in Colorado. For proof he noted that the first person to vote in the election was a 19 year old woman. Bush didn't claim that her voting decision could have had anything more than symbolic meaning.

The president's comments were a rough approximation of those offered by Vice President Cheney, who told a group of civic leaders in Iowa that democracy was being established in Afghanistan and that high voter turnout was the proof.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was clearly reading from the same script as Cheney when he commented that "democracy was firmly taking root in Afghanistan" and pointed to high voter turnout as the proof.

To no one's surprise, U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad also declared the presidential election a "profound success" and pointed to high voter turnout as the proof. Transitional President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai was thinking along the same lines when he dismissed criticisms that the election was flawed, saying "the Afghan people voted in the millions and nothing else matters to me." That he was universally predicted to win the election in either the first or second round of voting may have influenced Karzai's thinking just a smidgen.

National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice joined the chorus by predicting that the election "would be judged legitimate," chirpily insisting that, "I'm just certain of it." Notwithstanding Rice's formidable record of making conclusions in the absence of evidence, there are reasons to doubt the legitimacy of the polling in Afghanistan.

First, and most obviously, Hamid Karzai had an enormous advantage over the other 15 candidates in the race because he enjoyed the unofficial endorsement of the United States and its NATO allies. They put him in power in Afghanistan, or at least in power in the capital city of Kabul, and their armies, bodyguards and reconstruction aid have kept him alive and in power. That Karzai was supported by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, like Karzai another former UNOCAL executive and an ethnic Pashtun, was not a secret during the election. UNOCAL is a major player in the contemporary Great Game for control over the oil and natural gas deposits of Central Asian pipelinestan. Pashtuns comprise the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

If Karzai's accomplishments in office are largely sartorial in nature, quasi-incumbency nonetheless guaranteed him the lion's share of international and domestic news coverage. Thus he would have been the only national candidate familiar to many Afghan voters. The other candidates for the presidency were left were left to compete with another for votes by mobilizing narrow minority ethnic or provincial electoral bases.

Second, the actual voting procedures were less than free and fair. Afghanis registered to vote in record numbers, and then they kept on registering. Total voter registrations appear to have exceeded the total eligible population. Multiple registrations were especially apparent in the predominantly ethnic Pashtun provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan where Karzai was expected to receive the most votes. Pashtuns. Rather too conveniently, the electoral rules required that all ballots in the country be mixed together before the votes were counted in a procedure effectively disguising where candidates received votes. Then on election day, "irregularities" involving the supposedly indelible ink used to mark voter's thumbs undermined the ability to prevent multiple voting. To have fixed this election in any more sophisticated a fashion, Afghan authorities would have had to abandon old fashioned ballot box and hand counting of the ballots methods in favor of voting machines serviced by Diebold.

The basic problem with treating high voter turnout as the evidence that an election is democratic is that it substitutes considerations of quantity for considerations for quality. Elections in democracies are mechanisms for people to choose collectively from among alternative possible leaders. That's why real democrats care whether elections are sufficiently free and fair to present voters with meaningful choices and to record their decisions accurately. In contrast, elections in authoritarian states are mechanisms for people to legitimate government by leaders who have already chosen by other means. That's why authoritarians focus so much on high voter turnout.

Comparing the 2003 parliamentary elections in unambiguously democratic Switzerland and unambiguously authoritarian North Korea helps make the point. Swiss voters could choose candidates from six major political parties with comparable campaign resources and many minor protest political parties, and the votes that they cast actually determined which political parties formed the next government. North Korean voters were presented with a much simpler decision. They could vote 'yes' for the single slate of candidates selected for them by the leadership of the Korean Worker's Party. Of course, if they feeling particularly self-destructive on election day, they could always vote 'no.' Voter turnout in the Swiss election was a miserable 44.5 percent, low even by the standards of the other wealthy democracies, while voter turnout in the North Korean election approached 100 percent. If voter turnout is really the proper indicator of a democratic election, then we would have to conclude that North Korea is a model democracy and Switzerland a rank tyranny.

If quality rather than quantity is what really matters in democratic elections, then the chorus of congratulation about high voter turnout for the presidential election in Afghanistan and the eerie silence about its irregularities is probably bad news for the future of democracy in the country. The first elections conducted by governments attempting to move from authoritarianism to democracy are crucial. If they are flawed then subsequent elections are likely to be flawed in the same ways. Rather than signal democratization in Afghanistan, the election is likely to be a grim lesson for Afghanis in the futility of popular participation.