Afghanistan: About half of registered Afghan voters turned out for Sunday's parliamentary election, a sharp drop from last year's landmark presidential vote, election officials have estimated.
Early indications suggest that about six million of about 12.5 million eligible voters went to the polls on Sunday, said chief electoral officer Peter Erben, who called the turnout "satisfactory".
If that estimate holds through the final count, voter participation will have dropped almost 20 percentage points compared with last October's poll, when Afghans elected president Hamid Karzai by an overwhelming majority. Election workers began counting ballots yesterday. Final results are not expected for at least two weeks. Afghans who said during the campaign they didn't plan to vote cited several reasons, such as disgust with warlords on the ballot, confusion over the number of candidates, or apathy.
(LA Times/Washington Post service)