In the final step towards democracy, Afghans went to the polls to select a national parliament and provincial assemblies on Sunday. Some interesting little factoids courtesy of Newsday:
CANDIDATES:Sounds like it was a pretty good day for women in Afghanistan.
About 2,760 candidates are running for 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, parliament's lower house; 68 seats are reserved for women and 10 for Kuchi nomads.
More than 3,015 candidates are running for a total of 420 seats in 34 provincial councils. A quarter of the seats are reserved for women.
For parliament, 12 percent of candidates are women; the figure is 8.1 percent for provincial councils.
VOTING:
The 12.5 million registered voters -- nearly 42 percent women -- will cast ballots at 6,270 polling centers. The 40 million ballots range from one to seven pages. Because many Afghans are illiterate, they feature photographs and symbols for candidates.
Vote counting begins tomorrow with early results posted once a province has 20% counted. The final counts are expected by October 6th and certified results by October 22nd.
As usual, our good friend over at Bizzy Blog was right. He emailed on Saturday to say that he expected this story to be invisible to the American media. And sure enough, it was. I watched a few of the Sunday talk shows and didn't hear a single mention of it.
