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Afghanistan govt. seeks more control over elections
The Afghan government has drafted proposed changes to election law that would remove all three foreign members from the body that investigates fraud, limit the number of women in parliament and establish a host of new qualifications for candidates to run for office.
The thorough rewriting of the 2005 election law has raised the prospect that President Hamid Karzai intends to respond to the chaos of last year's presidential election by imposing changes that would give the government more control over the commission that documented the scope of electoral fraud. The five-member Electoral Complaints Commission -- including three international members appointed by the U.N. envoy to Afghanistan -- calculated that Karzai lost his first-round majority last August by the amount of vote-rigging and would need to face a run-off.