Officials of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Monday said that the audit process is in its second day with participation from both presidential candidates’ observers.
The process began 45 minutes late on Monday than the purposed start time of 7 a.m. IEC Spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor said the second day of audits was moving forward surely.
“There are two groups of 100 that work in two shifts,” Noor explained. “The audit begins at 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.”
He added that 21,909 ballot boxes have arrived in Kabul out of the total 22,828 boxes.
“In the next two days, all election materials will arrive in Kabul and today the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) will transfer ballot boxes from Takhar and Ghor provinces to Kabul.”
Disagreements between the two camps have mostly been about the ballot boxes that had more than 100 votes marked similarly as well as unmarked boxes with figures in favor of a particular candidate.
Abdullah's technical camp has stressed that the vote invalidation criteria should be finalized and implemented in order to discard the fake votes.
"Our demands have not been addressed yet and there are still problems in the vote invalidation procedure," a member of Abdullah's technical team, Fazel Ahmad Manavi, said. "The UN requested that we rejoin the process and pledged to address our demands by the end of this week."
The rival camp has warmly welcomed Abdullah's group in rejoining the audit process.
“We welcome Abdullah’s observers in rejoining the process," a member of Ghani-Ahmadzai’s team, Halim Fedayee, said.
Abdullah's camp maintains that the vote invalidation criteria were not complete. On the opposite spectrum, IEC Spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor has asserted that the criterion is final and complete.
“From IEC's point of view, the vote invalidation checklist is final,” Noor said firmly.
The two presidential camps have not reached agreements about issues such as similar signs on ballot papers, the usage of 600 or more ballot papers in support of a particular candidate and the marginal difference between the first and second rounds of the elections in specific provinces.
The auditing process initially resumed on Sunday after IEC announced its acceptance to the United Nations (UN) audit criteria last Wednesday.
Sunday morning Abdullah's team said they will refuse to participate in the audit procedure until their demands regarding the audit criteria was addressed.
Later that same day, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published a statement illustrating that an agreement has been met with Abdullah. They announced that they have accepted certain demands of Abdullah in regards to the audit criteria, adding that his team will rejoin the process on Monday.