KABUL — Election authorities on Wednesday halted the inspection of about 8 million ballots cast in last month’s presidential runoff in Afghanistan, heightening concerns that an already chaotic process to choose the country’s new leader could take months to complete.
The effort to reexamine the votes was paused for a full day to resolve differences between the two candidates over what criteria to use to scrap suspicious ballots, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission said.
The audit, which began last week, was expected to resume Thursday.
Tensions have been high since the June 15 election, in which former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah faced off against former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani after a round of voting in April in which neither secured the majority needed to win.
According to preliminary results released by the election commission, Ghani won 56 percent of the vote. Abdullah accused election officials of rigging the vote in favor of Ghani and announced that he was boycotting the Independent Election Commission. The impasse endangered Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power ahead of a scheduled pullout of foreign troops by the end of this year.
In a separate development, police said gunmen riding on a motorcycle opened fire and killed two Finnish female aid workers in the western Afghan city of Herat on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on foreign civilians that has rattled aid workers, contractors, and journalists.