Afghanistan Wednesday announced April 20 next year as the date for its presidential election, amid concerns that growing insurgent violence could threaten the poll.<\/p>\n
The vote will take place six months after parliamentary elections, which have been scheduled for October 20 after repeated delays.<\/p>\n
Current President Ashraf Ghani is widely expected to stand for another five-year term.<\/p>\n
The date was announced by Abdul Badi Sayad, chairman of the Independent Election Commission, who said security and other factors had been taken into account.<\/p>\n
The commission says nine million voters, including three million women, have registered since the electoral rolls opened in April despite attacks on voter registration centres.<\/p>\n
Security remains a major concern ahead of the polls, with the Western-backed government struggling against an insurgency by the resurgent Taliban and, increasingly, the Islamic State group.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecurity is an issue that we hope will be solved by then,\u201d said election commission spokesman Abdul Aziz Ibrahimi.<\/p>\n
He responded to concerns of voter fraud by saying the commission was \u201ccommitted to ensuring the transparency and integrity of both parliamentary and presidential elections\u201d.<\/p>\n
The last presidential election in 2014 was marred by allegations of massive fraud and vote-rigging. The two top contenders, Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, both claimed victory.<\/p>\n
It took months for the candidates to agree on a US-brokered deal to form a \u201cnational unity government\u201d in which Ghani was sworn in as president while Abdullah took up the newly created post of chief executive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Afghanistan Wednesday announced April 20 next year as the date for its presidential election, amid concerns that growing insurgent violence could threaten the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38030,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38031,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions\/38031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}