The cold haze from a dust storm the night before that enveloped the streets of Kabul on Election Day at first kept voters away from the polling stations. But as the day grew warmer, and anticipated attacks by insurgents on voters and voting precincts did not occur, more and more people came to cast their ballots – and not just in Kabul. Reports said that all over the country, many people showed up to vote. This could have made the results of the elections an unquestionable success and provide the necessary legitimacy to the country’s new president. But bad organization gave the opposition a chance to question the results.

The possibility of multiple voting was something election officials had anticipated from the outset. During the process of voter registration, in the weeks before the ballot, it became apparent that many people had managed to obtain more than one voting card. It is not certain whether this had been done with the purpose in mind to manipulate the outcome of the elections; according to some rumors, cards could be exchanged for food or health care. Weak voter awareness, no doubt partly because few candidates did much campaigning or explained things other than telling people they should vote for them might have been to blame for this.

Marking the finger tips of voters with indelible ink should in any case have prevented people from voting more than once. But on the day of voting, election officials initially either lacked this indelible ink or mistakenly used the wrong marker – with erasable ink – for the purpose. The fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) that had 2,300 observers in the field blamed this on bad organization and insufficient training of election officials, but it believed the problem didn’t result in massive fraud and called the elections “fairly democratic.” The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) came to the same conclusion.

Some problems, such as election officials ordering people how to vote at some precincts, voters being turned away at others because boxes were full and campaigning ongoing within yet some other polling stations were nevertheless observed. But it should be noted that, with a total of less than 3,000 election observers, rather few of the 22,000 voting precincts can have been monitored.

And Karzai’s 15 contenders did believe that massive fraud had taken place because of the ink failure and, halfway through the vote, decided to boycott the elections and not to recognize the result. Karzai’s main contender, former education Minister Yunus Qanuni, did not even cast his vote. The boycott could have seriously undermined the legitimacy of the winner – although some observers believed the opposition instigated the boycott to prevent a loss of face that would result from their near-certain loss from Karzai. Whatever the truth of this, gaining legitimacy for the country’s new leader was precisely one of the main objects the elections should aim for, according to the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). “Elections need to be perceived as legitimate by the majority of ordinary Afghans and the next president not only needs to win the majority of votes but fulfill the high expectations that Afghans have about these elections bringing positive changes in their lives,” says Thomas Muller, AREU’s communications manager.

And Afghanistan’s next president is likely to be Karzai: an exit poll conducted by the US International Republican Institute (IRI) that said it had interviewed more than 10,000 voters across Afghanistan, showed him already with a clear victory. Final results of the vote are not expected before the end of the month. Karzai wasn’t happy with the boycott. “Who is more important, these 15 candidates, or the millions of people who turned out today to vote?” he said.

The OSCE was also unhappy with the boycott. “The candidates’ demand to nullify the election is unjustified and would not do service to the people of Afghanistan,” said the head of the OSCE mission to Afghanistan, Robert Barry. But as unexpected as the boycott appeared, it started crumbling again. On Monday, after talks with Western and United Nations diplomats, Qanuni and another important presidential candidate, the leader of the Hazara ethnic group Mohammad Mohaqeq, decided to leave the boycott. They had been promised that a three-person independent panel would investigate the charges of irregularities on behalf of the UN.

“To respect the will of millions of Afghans and to go along with our national interests, I would accept the results of the election after the investigation,” Qanuni, who is rumored to have been promised an important position in the next cabinet as a reward for leaving the boycott, said.