Remember 2000? When Gore lost Florida on a seemingly endless Florida recount drama that would have been funny in a Hollywood movie but made an entire nation cringe with shame because it was, in fact, a reality. Bush won the Florida popular vote by just over 500 votes.

537 votes decided the president of the United States. 537 votes were the difference between having Bush in the White House when 9/11 happened rather than Al Gore. 0.01% of the vote. That’s incredibly tight and shows that anywhere in the world there can be controversy around the results of an election, and there are many factors that can be up for calls of foul.

That’s what’s happening in Afghanistan right now with the possible reelection of President Karzai- in the last election hundreds of thousands of votes were thrown out because they were uncountable. Basically there was what Al Jazeera calls “massive vote rigging” that led to over 1 million votes for Karzai being thrown out.
 
Peter Galbraith, a former UN elections monitor who was fired after speaking out about the abuses and problems with the first round of voting, told Al Jazeera:

"It is now time to close down those ghost polling centres, these are places where a large number of votes were recorded but they never actually opened. And ... in each and every case where there was fraud election commission staff either committed the fraud, co-operated with those who committed the fraud or failed to report it. All those staff need to be replaced, not just the 200 who are going to be replace.”

Those are strong allegations, but if his talk is enough to get him fired afterward, I would say there has to be something credible behind what he is talking about or else why would the UN care. Maybe it’s his direct approach to the UN staff about the issue:

"The head of the UN mission needs to stop pretending the independent election commission is an independent body. All its member were appointed by Karzai and it made partisan decisions at every stage in the process."

MMMMMmmm… Now that is something to look into. If the president who is accused of fraud is the one who is selecting the people to go and make sure that there is no fraud, you know that something is up.
But maybe it isn’t a problem that election committees and the UN can actually solve by trying to create a better election next time around- maybe it is a symptom of a failed democracy in Afghanistan. Not to get too deep into it, but if they can’t hold it together to hold an actual election and there are fraud and corruption charges coming out of every corner of the world, can you even imagine what the day to day running of the country is like? There is no way that things are going well- there is no way that they are a functional democracy. If Karzai is committing massive fraud, then he is ruling the country that way- not as a democratically elected leader.

The election isn’t the problem- calling what Afghanistan has a democracy is the problem.