 Let me begin by just drawing your attention to Afghanistan's geography. It's a landlocked country and probably the most salient point to note about that, although it doesn't quite show up here, is that it has a huge mountain range called the Hindukush, which runs right down the center of the country. Many of the mountains in the range are more than 20,000 feet tall. And what this means is that the environment itself is a challenging one in which to attempt to run an election because not only is the geography very harsh, but the transport networks within the country because of decades of conflict dating back to a coup in 1978, the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979 are also poor. Now this has cost implications for election planning in a number of different respects. One is that it's hard to move goods cheaply around the country. But another is that the equipment that one might use to move goods and material tends to wear out fairly quickly. The roads are poor. You have to have plenty of planning in transporting goods around the country for things like flat tires, broken axles, all the kinds of things that can confront one in an environment where you have a combination of savage geography and poor infrastructure. So that's part of the story in Afghanistan. It's also a country which has never had a census. Not in the history of Afghanistan has there been a census. This is partly because it has more than 50 different ethnic groups. And when that's the case, having a census is potentially a contentious political matter because each group fears that some other group will prove to be a larger proportion of the population. Those that think they're large want to have ethnicity included as a question. Those that think they're small don't want that included. And that has been a barrier to the gathering of census data, which in turn deprives the electoral authorities of certain kinds of baseline data that would be very useful in undertaking electoral planning. Having said that, the estimate of the Central Statistics Office is that the population is now about 34 million people. So we're not talking about a country with a small population, but of that population about 70% is under the age of 25. And it's also a population which is not extremely well documented in terms of dates of birth. So estimating when people might reach an age of eligibility to vote can be a somewhat tricky exercise in some parts of the country. Elections in Afghanistan are carried out pursuant to the provisions of the 2004 constitution that was adopted following the international intervention in 2001. And an electoral law adopted pursuant to that constitution that has gone through multiple phases of amendment, most commonly by presidential decree. And one of the unfortunate features of that constitution, and that's an important point I want to highlight, is that the political actors who crafted it did not really have in mind the logistical and managerial problems of running election when they decided what kind of structures to build into the constitution. So in fact the constitution contains provisions for the election of a president, the election of a lower house of parliament, the election of provincial councils, there's 34 provinces in Afghanistan, and district councils as well. And so the sheer burden of conducting elections of this kind is financially very considerable. There was no particular contemplation of how they might be brought together in order to reduce costs. And a calculation was made quite some years ago that Afghanistan could expect if it's stuck to the constitutional timetable to be having a major national election every year or every couple of years for the next 20 years. So there's not much breathing space provided as a result of the constitutional structure for electoral authorities after they finish one exercise before embarking on the next exercise. The key polls have been the presidential elections and the parliamentary elections. In fact there have been massive slippages in terms of the district elections, although on occasions they've had the provincial elections as well. One of the key lessons that emerges from Afghan experience is always to think of elections as processes marked by systemic complexity and interconnectedness rather than as events. There were some interesting innovations when the mechanisms for electoral administration were put in place. Of course the Afghan state had substantially collapsed in the 1980s following the Soviet invasion. It reached a state of utter debilitation under the Taliban between 1996 and 2001. So when the United States intervened in 2001 with its allies there really wasn't a functioning state in place that could be charged with running an election. There was no administrative capacity to do any of that sort. So for the first presidential election which was held in 2004 just months after the adoption of the new constitution, an independent election commission was appointed to be nominally the repository of national sovereignty for the purposes of the poll. But the actual running of the election was as much in the hands of what was called the JEMB, the Joint Electoral Management Body which had a significant degree of international input to assist at all stages of the process. And the chief advisor in this particular body was Professor Reginald Austin who had been the chief electoral officer in Cambodia with UNTAC in 1993. And there was a very strong ethos of capacity building within the JEMB at the time. The expectation of the key staff was that the people who were working in the election for 2004 would continue with careers in this particular sphere of activity and that the experience from the first election would then flow over into subsequent elections in a beneficial fashion. One other very interesting innovation which was brought in at that time was the establishment of a separate electoral complaints commission to which complaints about the running of the election by JEMB under the auspices of the independent electoral commission could be taken. And the majority of the members of the electoral complaints commission voting members were international professionals. People who themselves had no personal interest in the outcome of the election who were seen as distant by virtue of their distinct backgrounds from the electoral process itself. And this was one reason why the first two elections in Afghanistan, the presidential election in 2004 and the parliamentary election in 2005 were really not controversial in terms of their results because everyone knew that the ultimate determination of which votes were valid and which votes were invalid would lie in the hands of people who were dispassionate in terms of their approach to their task. Now having said that, a number of decisions that were taken early in the process of establishing electoral structures in Afghanistan had long-term ramifications. One related to the nature of political power in Afghanistan. The presidential palace, a seat in the parliament in Afghanistan, came to be seen as great prizes for competing political figures. On the basis that with aid pouring into the country in very large quantities at that stage, it was highly likely that people who could win elected political office would obtain at least some control over those resources, partly because it would be in their interest to redirect international aid resources into their own constituencies as brokers of a sort. And this could be a way in which people who were political aspirants could enhance their own power. So the environment was a highly competitive one, although for the first presidential election since Ahmed Karzai, the interim president, was still popular at that stage and there was confidence about the direction in which the country was going. The 2004 presidential election was something of an exercise in ratification rather than a highly competitive poll. This was not the case with the parliamentary election. The constitution provided for a legislature with two chambers, but the important elected one, the lower house, had 249 members, 239 coming from multi-member constituencies constituted by the provinces of the country, 10 coming from a nomad list because Afghanistan has a significant nomad population. The electoral system that was chosen was an extraordinarily perverse one, the single non-transferable vote, which up to that point had been used only in Japan, Jordan, Vanuatu and the Pitcairn Islands. And there were good reasons why this system had not been more widely used. It's because it in effect generates an almost complete breakdown in the relationship between political orientation in an electorate and representation in the parliament and this is how. And most of the other votes will end up being wasted and it was actually calculated after the 2005 legislative elections that out of six million votes that were cast, four million were cast for voters for candidates who did not succeed. Only two million voters from this huge population actually voted for people who ended up being chosen in the parliament and that's led to a weak party system ever since, but it's led to a system in which the government has sought to mobilise ethnic identity as a basis within the legislature after the parliament is elected because it needs to bring together different candidates in a bloc so that it's easier to get legislation through the parliament. So it both undermined political parties but amplified ethnicisation within the politics of the country. No one really understood this. What happened was that a relatively junior official was sent to the cabinet to make a presentation on the virtues of a closed list proportional system. He wasn't well prepared. Members of the cabinet began to ask him questions which he couldn't answer. Someone in the cabinet then said, well if you can't understand the system, how can we expect voters to understand the system? Not quite the right question to ask but it seemed potent at the time. Then someone else and some stories say it was President Karzai simply said, well why don't we let people just put a tick against the name of the candidate they like and add them up? Then no one really thought through the ramifications of that kind of system being adopted and it's a very good example of how what looked like small decisions can actually then cascade through into a whole range of areas which then have dramatic longer term ramifications and Afghanistan is still suffering the consequences of that and I'll come back to that issue in the effects of SNTV in just a moment. One of the problems that began to accrue in Afghanistan arose from the fact that by the time the second presidential election came around in 2009, President Karzai was much less popular than he'd been in 2004. There was a lot of disappointment with how he performed and there was a real sense in the country that the 2009 presidential election could be a lot more competitive than the 2004 one had proved to be. Now one of the features of presidential systems that can easily be overlooked is that if a president who's an incumbent loses office, that person's not the only person who loses out, there will be a whole stack of people who have tied their own political future to the survival of the incumbent president. Karzai had lost in 2009, he would have been given a fellowship at an American University to write his memoirs or something like that, but a whole range of his associates would have fallen a very long way indeed. This meant that the incentive for fraudulent behavior at the 2009 election was vastly larger than at the 2004 election and one of the consequences was that that was exactly what we witnessed. But something which aggravated that was to do with personnel in the elections administration. Despite the emphasis of the first team in 2004 on capacity building, by the time the 2005 legislative election came around, the responsibility for international cooperation had shifted from the joint electoral management body to the UN officer project services who brought in an international staffer to be chief electoral officer who was pretty notorious for going over budget. That then set the scene for what has become a very unhappy pattern ever since of substantial turnover both in the line of staff within the electoral administration and also the leadership of the electoral administration because sacking the entire independent electoral commission has now become the rule rather than the exception. And that has real implications for institutional memory and the capacity of people to remember mistakes of the past so they don't make them again in the future. It was also the case that the 2009 election was marked by industrial scale fraud. There were 5.66 million votes allegedly cast of these 1.3 million were invalidated by the Electoral Complaints Commission. That's an enormous proportion. And the best estimate from a scholarly study done in the British Journal of Political Science was 75% of the votes that were declared invalid had been in favour of President Karzai. And the effect of the invalidation of the votes was to set the scene for a runoff election. The Afghan presidential system followed the French system whereby if no single candidate got more than 50% of the vote in the first round of voting, a runoff would be held between the two candidates who did best in the first round. And the effect of the invalidation of the fraudulent votes was to take Karzai below the 50% threshold and set the scene for a runoff. He was not happy. And he categorically refused to countenance any reform in the administrative system that had actually spawned 1.3 million fraudulent votes. As a result, his opponent withdrew with a certain amount of dignity from a race which he thought had become meaningless. But the next step that the President took was to eliminate the internationals from the Electoral Complaints Commission. And ever since then, there has been a much angrier mood in the aftermath of the declaration of results of Afghan elections because the Election Complaints Commission is now seen as potentially as tainted as the Independent Electoral Commission in producing final results for the electoral process. The 2014 election again faced very substantial levels of fraud. And this was an interesting case. It's actually unique in my experience because after the first round of voting in which there was no majority candidate, because of term limits, Karzai couldn't stand again, so the two leading candidates were the former foreign minister, Dr Abdullah, who got 45% in the first round, the former finance minister, Dr Rani, who got 31%. Runoff was pending. There was great suspicion about what the runoff would involve, and then a series of telephone taps were leaked, probably from the National Directorate of Security, which had the chief electoral officer, Zihl Huck Amachel, plotting electoral fraud with some of his buttocks. It was plainly Amachel's voice. It was easily recognizable. They had a very crude code. Make sure you take all the sheep to the mountains and ensure that they're properly stuffed. Ballot box stuffing is very common in Afghanistan, so it wasn't a difficult code to crack. He was forced to resign, but it was not a glorious moment for the United Nations because they put out a statement. Let me find it for you here, which I would add can no longer be found on their website, which said, you now know that Mr. Amachel's long professional experience helped ensure that during his 10 years head of the IASX Secretariat, preparations for Afghanistan's historic presidential election were better managed and more advanced than those previously. Now, I mention that because people sometimes think that internationals will be of value when you're trying to enhance standards of electoral integrity, but don't count on it because sometimes they can be as pathetically supine in the face of manifest and gargantuan fraud as one could possibly imagine, and it doesn't do anyone any distinction under the circumstances. Now, added to this was the problem that from 2009 onwards, the United Nations had been very supportive of the idea of indigenizing all the electoral administration, even though the scale of the fraud in 2009 suggested that it was premature to say the least to go down that particular path. Well, that brings me to the 2018 election. And this was a very interesting manifestation of the interconnectedness of problems. How one decision can cascade down into other areas of electoral administration having dramatic unintended consequences. And here there were two that I want to draw to your attention. The first was that there was a decision made to change the basis upon which the eligibility of a voter presenting at a polling station would be determined. In the earlier elections in Afghanistan, voters when registering had been presented with a voter identity card. And on attending at a polling station, they would be required to present the card which would establish their identity. The card would then be clipped in the corner. The finger of the voter would be put in indelible ink to prevent multiple voting. And the ballot paper would be issued. And this system was seen as recognizing that a lot of people in the Afghan population are internally displaced. That there's potentially quite a lot of population mobility between the point at which someone might register as a voter and when an election could be held which could make it unfair to tie somebody to a particular district or area for purposes of voting. But this was also seen as potentially a source of fraud because it became clear at some stage that far more voter identity cards had been issued probably fraudulently at the local level than there were eligible voters within the electorate. So in 2018, a new system was used in which voters were required to register at a particular polling place. And their eligibility to vote would be determined by the presence of their name and identifying information on a list of voters to be distributed by the Independent Election Commission to the different polling places of the country. This I've labeled a voter in Kapisa province. Now one voter, what's one voter? Couple of stories here. This voter was actually the deputy foreign minister of Afghanistan. He had registered to vote at a polling station in a mosque 100 meters from his home in Kabul. When he went out to vote on the morning of the election, I was with him, he's a former student of mine, the polling station to start with had not opened because the voter list had not arrived. There was a large queue outside. When he got in the polling station they could not find his name on the list. And he ended up voting out of town in Kapisa in his village where everyone knew who he was. And they were prepared to give him a ballot paper and write his name by hand on the bottom of the list of voters when he averted and I affirmed that he had not voted earlier in the day. And the chief executive officer of Afghanistan, Dr. Abdullah, his name couldn't be found for 45 minutes when he turned up to vote. There were massive problems associated with the logistics of distributing accurate lists to polling places. Some polling places didn't receive the list at all. Other polling places had large numbers of names missing from the list. And this is potentially very dangerous. There was one polling place where every name beginning with the letter I was missing. Now this happens to be the first letter in the name Ali which is typically used by Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan. So if you'd had a district where most of the population was Shi'a and most of the Ali's were missing you'd probably have a riot. Because it would immediately be interpreted as a political move to disenfranchise members of the population. So this particular little illustration is a very good example of the challenge of moving from one system to another. But there was another challenge associated with that which hadn't been anticipated at all, which is the following. When you move to having lists of this sort typically what you would find is that different clutches of the alphabet would be distributed between different polling stations. Typically in an Afghan polling center which might be a school building or a mosque you would have a number of different polling stations to which people could queue in order to cast their votes. So in 2018 there were four, at least four polling stations for male voters and at least one for female voters but potentially more because again women and men are separated for purposes of voting in Afghanistan which has its own budgetary and logistic challenges. What happened in 2018 was that at the very last minute a decision was made to deploy biometric technology into polling places as an anti-fraud device. This was done in the face of enormous pressure from political parties that because of the fraud in 2009 and 2014 had lost confidence in the integrity of the process. The IEC had no political capital left on which to draw in order to try to reinforce its position and so the parties put this pressure on the IEC to deploy biometric technology in which they had a simple faith. And it reached the point where parties were setting up demonstrations to prevent IEC officers in major cities from opening and shots were being fired to clear the crowd so it was not a trivial problem. Now the government found money for the machines but it did not find money for a budget line to start the machines. So people who had originally been designated to be queue managers were taken off the task of managing queues and put on the task of running the biometric machines. That meant that there were no designated queue managers at most polling places. Even though for the first time in Afghan experience people turning up at a polling center needed to be able to get guidance as to which queue they should join in order to get into the right polling station. The polling station where the list was contained that had their names because it's like anyway really you'd have A, B, C, D in one place, F, G, H, I, J and the next and that kind of thing rather than having each station with the complete list. Well, this was not popular with voters because of the security situation. There was great apprehension on the part of voters of terrorist attacks on queuing voters outside a polling place. And indeed when I was driving into Kabul on the evening of the election there had just been a suicide bombing at a polling place in police district 17 which I'd passed in the morning and the ambulances were roaring up the hill and the police were directing all the vehicles up side streets which was not that thrilling either I would have to say. And so the apprehension that voters had about being in the vicinity of a polling center as short a time as possible was a perfectly understandable one. I know plenty of Afghans whose families went out not together but one by one out of fear that if there were a bombing it could have deprived children of all the adult members of their family. We tend not to worry about this in Australia but in places like Afghanistan this needs to be part of electoral planning. Now the result was chaos out a lot of polling stations as well. People were getting to the head of queues and being told no you're in the wrong queue you have to go and join the back of the queue over there and we're getting very angry about it really. And this is serious in that it compromises a genuine commitment to the participation of people in the election. I have no doubt that a lot of people felt that they'd been around for too long for safety at the polling center anyway and went home without casting their vote even though their intention had been to take part in the election. This is the ballot paper for Kabul, the capital city. There were 803 names on the ballot paper. On 16 different sheets which given to each voter with simply sort of sticky stuff at the top like a pad of paper. Now because of high levels of non-literacy in Afghanistan there's a limited extent to which one can reduce the size of this because for each candidate you have the candidate's name, you have a photograph of the candidate for the benefit of people who can't read the name of the candidate. You then have a unique symbol for the candidate for people who haven't never seen the candidate before for whom they wish to vote. And most of the advertising by candidates before the election was actually focused on getting voters to know not the name of the candidates per se but actually the symbol on the ballot paper that could be used to it. And then of course you had a box into which the cross by the candidate needed to be put. So you had a mountainous ballot paper and this was not the first time this had happened. In the 2005 election I remember seeing an angry voter in Park Mon just picking up the ballot paper which again was a booklet, throwing it on the ground and stomping out because he couldn't find the name of the candidate for whom he wanted to vote. One nice thing that did however happen which shows how shrewd voters can be there was a certain amount of buying going on in which people who were trying to buy votes would require that a person who was selling their vote would take a photograph with a mobile phone of the ballot paper showing that they had marked the ballot paper in favour of the person playing the bright. We encountered again in the province of Capisa somebody who came in and he got out a tiny square of paper with a tick on it, put it on the ballot paper very carefully, then photographed the ballot paper and then threw away the tick and marked the paper for the candidate he wanted. It restores your faith in voters when you see that kind of thing. Now why would you get people buying votes? I've attached here, I've handed out to you a sheet which has the results from Kabul for the election last year and I want to draw a couple of things to your attention first. The election was on the 20th of October last year. The results for Kabul were finally certified on the 15th of May this year. In the meantime, the entire IEC and the entire ECC had been fired and replaced by new people. Seven months it took to get the results from the capital. Now one of the reasons for that was that there were a lot of irregularities. The Electoral Complaints Commission had initially put out a decree in validating the entire election for the capital and that led to a massive dispute between the Independent Electoral Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission which ended up with everyone being fired and new people appointed. The other thing I wanted to draw to your attention was the following. There were 33 seats to be filled in Kabul and of these, 24 were for male candidates and the remaining nine were for female candidates because one of the strengths of the Afghanistan Constitution is that it has a specific quota for the election of women members of the Walaiz-e-Jeru which has meant that about 25% of the members ever since the 2005 election have been women. A significant improvement on a lot of Australian legislatures. The inadequacies in the voter list were not just in terms of people missing entirely from the list, but also in terms of data entry. And at one of the polling stations I was at, there was an old gentleman who had walked about six kilometers to get to the polling place. On the voter list, there were four items to be included. The name of the voter, the name of the voter's father, the name of the voter's grandfather and then the number of the voter's identity card which is called a tasquera in Afghanistan. In the case of this elderly voter, his name was correct, his father's name was correct, his grandfather's name was correct and there was a one digit error in the tasquera number which was plainly a data entry problem. But he was refused the right to vote and he was very upset about it. There had been a provision in the electoral law for the display of provisional lists of voters one week before the election so that people could check to see that all their details were accurate, how valuable that is as debatable. But that was in the law, but because everything happened so late because of the failure to provide lists on time, that simply didn't happen. So people were discovering for the first time when they turned up at polling places that there was a problem and there was no provisional voting system of the kind that exists, for example, in Australia where if you have an error in the roll, a person can fill out a ballot paper which is then isolated from the main ballot box but has the potential to be inserted with secrecy preserved in the main ballot box if it is established that the person was, in fact, eligible to vote. There was no such thing in Afghanistan. They out actually now for the presidential election brought in a provision which allows the name of such a voter to be manually entered into the list. But of course that opens the door to problems if you have somebody who is genuinely not entitled to vote and whose name shouldn't be on the list but then presents himself or herself at a polling place seeking a ballot paper. This was the printer for one of the biometric machines that was used in Afghanistan. It was connected wirelessly to a data collection facility which could take the fingerprints of a voter and take an image of the voter that would be encrypted and take a photograph of the voter number on the voter's tascara. And the notion was that these would be printed out by this little printer and attached to the back of the ballot paper as a mechanism to prevent multiple voting. That one would need to be physically present at a polling place and accessing this machine in order for a vote to be included. Now you can debate the value of that. Somebody calculated that you could actually by moving your fingers around get 45 different ballot papers before the system would run into difficulties and it was not connected to a real-time central database by which potentially a warning flag could go up to signal that somebody had already voted or somebody with the relevant identifying features had voted. So it's value is debatable. The lesson here I think is one needs to be very, very, very careful about seeing high tech in a low tech country as the solutions for any kind of problem. I wouldn't say that you can't ever use a biometric technology but you need to be hyper alert to the limitations of what it can actually deliver in the context of the electoral environment. Maybe if machines of this sort fail in an environment where everyone knows who's going to win the election anyway and is happy with the outcome, it's not going to matter so much. But if you have a highly fraught election where everyone is looking for a basis upon which they can impugn an outcome that they don't like, then this is an extraordinarily weak link in the system. And there's one final point on which I'd like to conclude and it comes back to the theme of finance and cost that's underpinned our discussions over the last couple of days. Money you spend on one thing is money you don't have the available to spend on another thing, opportunity cost. So if you spend a lot of money on biometric technology, for example, you are in trouble if the result is that you are economizing unduly on things like training. And integrity management and auditing within your staff. Frankly, I think that if you have a crooked staff or a staff who've been intimidated by warlords or gunmen in the countryside, there's no technology that is going to protect you against the insidious effects of that kind of pressure. And money that's being spent on machines might much better be spent on finding ways of insulating polling staff from pressures that they illegitimate be faced from the powerful and the wealthy and the well armed. And this brings me to my final point. Beware of donors who want to fund the wrong things. It's actually commonly the case in a country like Afghanistan that you will find donors who are much more willing to fund a school building where you can put a nice plaque on the site safe funded by the Australian Agency for International Development. And they are to train the teachers who will make it a school rather than just a collection of bricks and mortar. The same applies in the area of electoral administration. There are certain basics that you have to have funded, but there are other kinds of areas where the opportunity cost of going high tech can be very severe indeed if it is at the expense of nurturing a cohort of professional staff who will be with you, who will become the custodians of the positive culture of a positive organization. And if that is sacrificed in favor of a bit of equipment that can be carried away in a little old lady's handbag, then something has gone terribly wrong with the planning process. Thank you very much.