The United Nations-backed commission serving as the arbiter of the Afghan elections announced on Tuesday that it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount even as election officials declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a majority in the preliminary vote count.

With 91.6 per cent of the polling stations counted, they said, Karzai had won 54.1 per cent of the vote, and his main challenger, the former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 28.3 per cent. The tally, if certified, would mean that Karzai would be declared the victor without need for a runoff.

But officials from the Independent Election Commission said they had set aside results from hundreds of polling stations where irregularities were suspected, and it is possible that investigations into fraud could change results. Abdullah has repeatedly accused the Karzai government of voting fraud.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Electoral Complaints Commission, an Afghan and international panel that will certify the final count, said it had found a “clear pattern” of fraud in the polling stations it investigated in the southern and eastern provinces of Kandahar, Paktika and Ghazni.

The ballot boxes, the commission said, were tainted in one of two ways: either they were stuffed with an “exceptionally high number of presidential votes” in relation to the number of ballots available, or they contained an “exceptionally high percentage of votes” cast for one candidate, or both. The statement did not say which candidate had benefited, but Karzai won large numbers of votes in those areas.

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