Illegal Election Cards in Afghanistan: Evidence from a Survey of Voters in Jalalabad City

Abstract

This paper focuses on illegally-obtained voter ID cards in Afghanistan. Anecdotes suggest that some voters obtain more than one ID card and use them in the election, which violates the election law. The paper seeks to understand how spread out are the illegal possessions of multiple ID cards, characteristics of the people who illegally obtain multiple cards, and whether and to what extent illegal card holders use their cards in elections to vote multiple times.

We conducted an original survey of 300 voters in Jalalabad City in Nangarhar Province in order to examine these questions. We find that:

(1) approximately 20% of the respondents hold two or more voter ID cards;

(2) illegal card holders tend to be less educated; and

(3) more than 50% of the illegal card holders voted multiple times in the first and second rounds of the 2014 presidential election.

Keywords: Election fraud, voter ID card, multiple voting, Afghanistan