Tuesday, August 25, 2009

"Too Close to Call"

Well, my predictions from yesterday are looking to be quite wrong.

Early results, released today as announced, put the two leading candidates in what is nearly a dead tie; Karzai has 41% and Abdullah 39%. Only 10% of the votes have been counted, and it's unclear which 10% (it's almost certainly not random). Special Envoy Holbrooke said that it's way too early to call whether this election will go to a run-off, and he's right.

It begs the question: what the heck was Karzai's finance minister thinking? It seems difficult to think that he is right in his assessment of the vote count (and that the Independent Election Commission is reporting some tiny, skewed subsection of the vote despite knowing more). If he's wrong, does he know it? Does he have some flawed source? The announcement continues to trouble me.

More updates as we hear them.

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