Word: bashardost
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There are also those who say the entire tabulation process is inherently flawed. Ramazan Bashardost, the parliamentarian and anti-corruption maverick who ran third in exit polls, says the Electoral Complaints Commission is breaking the law by releasing figures before completing its investigation into alleged vote-rigging. (The head of the commission, Aziz Ludin, said the decision to release preliminary figures is within the letter of the law, adding that it was agreed upon at an internal commission meeting - in part to steer clear of the kind of controversy that marred the 2000 U.S. presidential election.) Bashardost tells TIME that...
...Bashardost rejects the numbers, and may be alone in thinking he can still win. His campaign is unrelenting. As the sun crept over the mountains to the east of the city, he and a small entourage headed for the airport to catch a free flight on an Afghan Army plane to Herat, in western Afghanistan, for another day on the road...
...critique of Karzai and the warlords is matched by a loud disdain for foreign aid agencies that have spent billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts with lackluster results. As planning minister in 2004, Bashardost called for non-governmental organizations to be expelled (he would resign from the job out of frustration). Today, Bashardost insists he's not against them all, just the "no-good guys" who waste money on bogus projects while parading around in expensive sport utility vehicles. Still, he estimates the cash-guzzling NGOs to be about 90% of the total based in the country...
...questions his frugality. Bashardost, never married, sometimes sleeps on a rickety bed by his tent and fields calls on a cracked cell phone. He distributes most of his $2,000 monthly government salary to the poor, he says. And his campaign, funded by donations and Afghans living abroad, has cost less than $25,000 so far. (Other sources of funds: posters and promotional DVDs sold to supporters for twenty cents each.) "Bashardost has campaigned very effectively, traveling around the country, reaching out to the poor as a populist on a bicycle," says Haroun Mir, director of the Afghan Center...
Although critics have long written him off as an eccentric destined to stay at the fringe, Bashardost appears to have struck a chord. With less than a week until Afghans go to the polls to vote for only the second time to choose a president, a pair of recent polls showed he had alternately 8% or 10% of voters surveyed last month, placing him third behind president Hamid Karzai and his rival, Abdullah, and ahead of Ashraf Ghani, the brainy former finance minister...