If we hadn’t been rushing to get the Afghani election done in time for our election, do you think someone might have thought of using indelible ink?
My guess, which is worth exactly what you paid for it, is that Karzai wasn’t actually trying to cheat by having his folks vote more than once. After all, he hardly needed to bother, did he, with the American Ambassador acting as his virtual campaign manager? The most striking fact about the election, it seems to me, is that in the run-up to it all the tension was about whether the voting would happen rather than about who would win.
The fact that all the other candidates called for a mid-day boycott of the vote says either that (1) they disagree with me about vote-rigging; or (2) they were looking for an excuse to back out because they knew they couldn’t win and wanted to deny Karzai a triumph at the polls. Neither theory says anything encouraging about the future of Afghan democracy.