KABUL, Afghanistan — The electoral process was as much a mystery for Qummergul as the photo of herself on her new registration card, which caused her to giggle with delight.
“My son told me to come here,” explained the middle-aged woman, whose husband was killed by the Taliban four years ago. “When the time comes to choose a new king, he will tell me what to do.”
Other women registering recently at a scruffy high school in Kabul had even less of an idea why they were there. All of them — like all the U.N.-trained women registering them — said they would vote for whoever their husbands or sons told them to.
For Max Campos, a weary U.N. electoral officer overseeing registration at the school, none of this was new.
“People are disappointed when we tell them we’re not giving anything away. Some people come here expecting some food,” he said.
“There’s very little understanding of what the process is. Things we take for granted, like women’s rights and political parties — many Afghans have never heard of these things.”
Afghanistan’s scheduled elections, widely anticipated as a milestone in the country’s post-Taliban recovery, were postponed last week from June to September, owing in part to the slow pace in registering voters.
Halfway through the six-month period allotted for voter registration, the United Nations has registered barely 10 percent of Afghanistan’s estimated 10.5 million eligible voters. U.N. electoral workers have been frustrated by ignorance of the electoral process and by factional and guerrilla violence, which has left southern Afghanistan practically off-limits to foreign workers.
President Hamid Karzai said a September polling date would allow presidential and parliamentary elections to be held simultaneously.
But, with still no electoral law to delimit constituencies and still no political parties in Afghanistan, U.N. workers in Kabul were doubtful that parliamentary elections could be held this year at all.
Reg Austen, the chief U.N. electoral officer, blames the slow progress on a shortage of cash and, especially, on insecurity.
“Money is a major problem. We started at least two months late because we couldn’t raise the funds we needed, and we still can’t,” Mr. Austen said.
Since the killing of a French U.N. worker by Taliban guerrillas in November, Mr. Austen’s staff have been barred from most of southern Afghanistan. A plan to use the area’s mosques as registration and polling stations was shelved, after the Taliban threatened to kill any mullahs cooperating with the plan.
“Even in Kabul, we’re effectively under a 24-hour curfew. From an election point of view, it’s a complete disaster,” Mr. Austen said. “OK, people will say, ’You’re stupid to try holding an election in a country still half at war.’ But I’m afraid that’s the situation we’re in.”
Mr. Austen’s latest plan is to recruit 35,000 local electoral officers, to man 7,000 registration and polling offices in some of the world’s remotest places. Once trained, these officers will be charged with registering the 8.5 million eligible voters living outside Afghanistan’s main towns.
Registering women will be especially tricky in fiercely traditional southern Afghanistan, where a woman’s name is a jealously kept family secret and women rarely are permitted to leave their homes.
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