By Mujib Mashal and Fahim Abed
The contradictory claims by the camps of President Ashraf Ghani and his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, came two days after the voting was held despite hundreds of attacks by Taliban insurgents, who had called the election illegitimate and warned Afghans not to participate.
Afghanistan’s election commission, the body administering the vote and responsible for declaring its winners, was feeling the weight of the task even before the camps of Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah asserted they were winning.
The voting on Saturday was so far regarded as relatively clean compared with previous elections that were marred by widespread fraud.
Although irregularities were reported across the country during the voting, and about 2,500 complaints were registered, experts as well as the rival teams have said large-scale fraud was mitigated and was easier to detect this time, partly because of strict biometric verification of voters.
Still, the competing assertions by the leading candidates — even though it will take two weeks to count all the ballots — raised new worries that one or the other would declare the vote illegitimate when final results are tabulated.
“We have high votes, and in the current situation the election will not go to a runoff and we will form the next government,” Mr. Abdullah said.
He had been Mr. Ghani’s coalition partner in the government brokered by the United States after the messy 2014 contest between the two men went to a stalemate.
Hours later Amrullah Saleh, Mr. Ghani’s running-mate, held a news conference urging other candidates to respect the rules and not jump to conclusions. Then, he basically declared his team the winner.
“The institution that has the right to declare winners and losers is the independent election commission,” Mr. Saleh said.
“The figures we have is that it will be a landslide victory for us,” he added. “There will be no runoff. I have an intelligence background and I triple-check everything before discussing.”
The elections were held just weeks after peace talks collapsed between the Taliban and the United States. American forces have been deployed in the country since the United States led a military invasion of Afghanistan about 18 years ago and routed the Taliban government, which had sheltered the Al Qaeda militants who plotted the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The United Nations, the United States government, and the European Union have all called on the electoral authorities to show impartiality and efficiency, and asked the candidates to show restraint and respect.
Gen. Austin S. Miller, the commander of United States. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, praised the Afghan forces for having secured the vote despite the hundreds of Taliban attacks on Election Day.
“What was perhaps most impressive to me was, I watched the different security pillars, along with civil authorities, become well-integrated to ensure an environment” conducive to elections, General Miller told reporters on Monday. ”Despite the threat of violence, the people who chose to vote were able to go to polls and vote.”
About one third of the country’s polling centers remained closed on Election Day because they could not be secured or were in Taliban-controlled territories. Data from roughly 80 percent of the polling centers where votes were recorded show that about 2.1 million people cast ballots.
Calculation of the total turnout was delayed partly because Taliban saboteurs wrecked telecommunication towers in parts of the country. Election officials expect the figure to reach about 2.5 million. That would be a historic low.
But calculations and comparisons of voter turnout in Afghanistan are difficult. Turnout figures in previous elections were tainted by widespread claims that they had been fraudulently inflated. In a famous case of ballot stuffing, the shoe of a fraudster was found in one overly packed box.
To prevent recurrences, Afghanistan has introduced polling-center based voter lists and new devices that fingerprint and photograph voters for verification.
On voting day, there were problems with the voter lists in large parts of the country and some reports of equipment malfunctions. Some videos have emerged purporting to show ballot stuffing, though not on the scale of prior elections.
Election officials insisted that they would only count the votes that had proper biometric verification and were cast during the hours that polling was open. They insisted that the biometric devices, procured from Dermalog, a German company, could not produce falsified information.
“It was guaranteed to us by the company that the devices have the capability of registering the time of voting and the location of voting — if the location of devices is changed, the server will not accept that vote,” said Rahima Zarifi, a member of the election commission.
Responding to concerns that a person could have voted multiple times using duplicate photos or by varying fingers, Ms. Zarifi said their central server could detect duplicate votes.
A low turnout means that a small margin of votes could decide whether one of the 13 candidates wins in the first round, achieving the 50 percent-plus one minimum required, or the election goes to a runoff.
Scrutiny will focus on the election commission — how transparently it tallies the votes and deploys technical tools to weed out fraud.
Although officials have insisted that security planning was apolitical, supporters of Mr. Abdullah have raised concern that relatively fewer polling centers remained open in insecure provinces where he was a favorite, such as the northern province of Balkh or the western province of Herat.
By contrast, Mr. Abdullah’s supporters said, in insecure provinces where Mr. Ghani was considered the favorite, such as the eastern province of Nangarhar or the southern province of Kandahar, a larger number of polling stations remained open.
But as far as the administering of the vote was concerned, there seemed broad agreement among experts, as well as the teams of the two main candidates, that the commission had shown progress.
“So far, from what I have seen, this election was in better quality from last year’s or the one in 2014, and there is little indication of systemic fraud,” said Abdullah Ahmadzai, a former Afghan chief election officer.
Reporting was contributed by Fatima Faizi from Kabul, Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Najim Rahim from Mazar e Sharif, and Assadullah Timory from Herat.
