Karzai does well in fictitious polling places.

There are numerous reports and complaints about fraud in the election. Not only did Karzai in some cases do extremely well in opposition strongholds as this article shows many polling stations never opened and existed only on paper 800 in all, yet Karzai managed to get many votes in them. So far only 447 polling station results have been rejected. This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. In other stations there were ten times more votes than voters registered. If the situation is the same as it was in Iran voters can vote from outside the voting area but these multiples are just beyond credence. Richard Holbrooke called the elections a great success but that has about the same truth ring about it as Bush claiming just when the Iraq resistance was starting that the mission was accomplished in Iraq!"This is from antiwar.com.

""For one thing, officials say about 800 polling sites, nearly 15% of the overall number in the election, never actually opened and indeed "existed only on paper." That didn't stop the sites from reporting thousands of votes. Unsurprisingly, President Karzai did remarkably well among fictitious voters.

In some provinces officials are also saying that the ballot box stuffing was so severe that President Karzai got 10 times as many votes as there were people who actually voted. Though officials have disqualified 447 stations so far, the number seems to be a drop in the bucket compared to what officials say is "fraud en masse.""

The latest reports are likely to do serious harm to US ambassador Richard Holbrooke's claims that the Afghan election was a "great success" and that the fraud was the sort of thing that "happens in every democracy." ""