Kabul - The preliminary result for Afghanistan's hotly contested presidential election was scheduled to be announced on Wednesday afternoon, Independent Election Commission (IEC) said in a statement. The IEC had already processed the votes from 95 per cent of the polling stations, while setting aside 2.15 per cent of that due to allegations of fraud, tallying 92.8 per cent.
According to the latest count, President Hamid Karzai received 54.3 per cent of the vote, enough to win the election in the first round, while Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, received 28.1 per cent.
However, the August 20 election, the second in Afghanistan's history, was marred by allegations of large-scale fraud.
The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) ordered a audit and recount of around 10 per cent of the vote on Tuesday, a process that could drag Karzai's share of the vote to below 50 per cent and force a run-off with his top challenger Abdullah.
The announcement for the final and certified results, which was slated for September 17, has been delayed several weeks because the ECC needed more time to investigate more than 2,000 complaints of fraud with more than 700 of them serious enough to affect the outcome.
