The Independent Election Commission (IEC) reported early on Wednesday that by the end of the day they would have registered the last of the result sheets from this year's runoff election.
According to the IEC, so far from the total number of 22,828 result sheets, 21,993 have been registered in the database.
"About a 1,000 checklists remain and we will work on them and all these checklists will be processed by the end of the day," acting IEC Secretariat Chief Jawed Habibi said. "Tomorrow we will work on some other technical issues, for instance, preparing the final report and rechecking all the work that has already been done to be confident in the quality."
However, the data registration process will not be the end of the IEC's work to bring this year's now five month-long election process to a close. The election commission will conduct the eighth round of vote invalidations on Friday and will decide on the fates of the votes from the remaining 4,269 polling sites. The final results from that will then be forwarded on to the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC).
"We will have 24 hours for complaints registration process and the ECC will have 48 hours to investigate these complaints, later on we will have the decisions of the ECC and will implement the decisions in the system and this will be the end of the technical process," Habibi explained.
Once the results are registered, and the vote invalidation process is completed, it is expected to be just a matter of days before the IEC can announce the results of the election.
But with the candidates still in a deadlock when it comes to negotiations over their national unity government, the question is raised: will the IEC announce the results before the candidates reach a final agreement?
"The election commission can't wait forever to see the candidates reach an agreement, the election commission will announce the results after the completion of the technical process and investigation of the complaints," IEC spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor has said.
But many suspect the IEC will try to buy time as the negotiations continue. According to sources within the electoral camps, the two candidates remain at odds over the issue of the powers to be granted to the Chief Executive position.