Afghan President Ashraf Ghani (centre) at a press conference in Kabul on December 10. Photo: Reuters

Kabul: A new report by European Union election observers on Tuesday supported some of the starkest estimates of systematic electoral fraud in the Afghan presidential runoff election in June, and said an earlier audit of the voting had invalidated only a small fraction of suspect votes.

The report provides the fullest picture yet at the allegations of fraud that plagued the election, suggesting that more than 2 million votes - or about a quarter of total votes cast - came from polling stations with voting irregularities.

Reports of widespread fraud led to a political crisis pitting the campaigns of Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah against each other after the preliminary results tilted dramatically in favor of Dr Ghani.

Uneasy partners: The European Union is reluctant to rock the boat now shared by Dr Ghani (right) and his "chief executive" Abdullah Abdullah (left), seen here during a visit to Berlin on December 5. Photo: AFP

The standoff led US Secretary of State John Kerry to broker a power-sharing deal in which Dr Ghani was named as president and Dr Abdullah was named as the government's "chief executive". That nominal arrangement has held, but the two camps have struggled over the precise division of powers, and so far have not been able to come to agreement on a cabinet, nearly three months after the inauguration.

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Wary of upsetting this tenuous balance, the EU's chief observer for the Afghan election, Thijs Berman, sought to strike a conciliatory tone at a news conference on Tuesday in which he discussed the new election report.

Mr Berman praised both Dr Ghani and Dr Abdullah for their "statesmanlike restraint", calling the power-sharing agreement "the best way to respect the will of Afghan voters" under the circumstances. But of the election, Mr Berman noted that "one can sadly be sure that a lot went wrong in many places".

The report from Mr Berman's election assessment team did not provide a figure for how many votes it believed to be invalid, but it did point to a number of irregular voting patterns that raise doubts about more than 2 million votes. In particular, it noted that millions of votes came from polling stations with unexpectedly high turnouts or where the votes were cast almost uniformly in favour of one candidate - both of which are "extremely unlikely and an indication of possible fraud", he said.

In the runoff, for instance, 2.06 million votes cast, or some 26 per cent of the total, came from polling stations in which turnout was reported to have reached or exceeded 99 per cent of the predicted turnout of 600 voters per polling station.

While Afghanistan has not conducted a census in more than 30 years and has only a sketchy sense of its population figures, those statistics were cause for concern, Mr Berman said. Furthermore, the unexpectedly high turnout reports often happened in provinces far from the country's main population centres, such as Khost and Paktika, where anecdotal accounts by local residents suggested that the actual turnout was extremely sparse, given Taliban threats.

The report cited another voting irregularity: More than 2.3 million votes during the runoff came from polling sites in which more than 95 per cent of the votes went to one candidate. Of those, 378,281 votes, or 5 per cent of the total, came from polling stations that reported that 100 per cent of the vote went just one way.

"You never see that," Mr Berman said in an interview. "That is a North Korea situation."

During the runoff, Dr Abdullah's team had favoured discounting ballot boxes in which 93 per cent or more of the votes, a far lower threshold, were for a single candidate.

The report criticised Afghanistan's election commission for invalidating too few votes. While the commission invalidated 5 per cent of the ballot boxes, EU observers found that at least 15 per cent of them showed evidence of tampering, such as a problem with the seal.

New York Times