Today the Afghan people go to the polls to elect a new president. Intute staff have found a number of good sites for keeping up to date with the latest news.
The Independent Election Commission (IEC of Afghanistan) is the constitutional body which acts to supervise the conduct of parliamentary and presidential elections in the region. Available are full text electoral laws, regulations, election results and reports on the conduct of all elections held since 2004.
Two other key Afghan bodies are The Electoral Complaints Commission an independent body established to hear issues relating to complaints about the conduct of presidential and parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Its English language website provides free access to press releases and some reports and statistics on the number of complaints handled. These include examples of electoral fraud and political violence in the region.
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). monitors examples of human rights abuses in the region. Its website has useful examples of full text reports covering all areas of rights.
A number of International bodies are monitoring the elections. Their websites contain assessments of events and the state of democracy in general. Try the EU mission. OSCE and NDI
Another invaluable resource is the UNDP/ELECT Afghanistan elections project which has reports from the UN mission. It also includes facts about the Afghan electoral system, as well as examples of civic education campaign materials. There is a link to a UN flickr site with over 500 images.
Some newspapers and think tanks have created special sites to offer coverage of the elections. You can browse the ones offered on Intute.
One good example is the Af-Pak Channel,a special project of Foreign Policy and the New America Foundation. It was created to monitor issues relating to international security and terrorism in the Pakistan, Afghanistan region. The website includes daily news briefs, twitter postings, blogs, photo essays, articles and comment from Foreign Policy journalists.
Heather Dawson says: August 21, 2009 @ 9:37 am
Just noted a couple more good sites for tracking any corruption during the elections.
The Alive in Afghanistan elections site is using SMS technology
http://aliveinafghanistan.org/
for volunteers to send in any reports of vote rigging
the free and Fair Election Foundation is an NGO which monitors human rights http://fefa.org.af/