40% of what?

Fun with statistics:

Nobody knows how many voters there are in Afghanistan, mainly because nobody knows how many people live in Afghanistan…Over the years 17.5 million voter cards have been distributed and it is now widely accepted that several million of them are either duplicates or not linked to actual voters. Recently the IEC [Independent Electoral Commission] has been using the figure of 12.5 million estimated voters, while UN [Special Representative]  Steffan di Mistura floated the figure of 10.5 million estimated voters, just days before the election.

Afghanistan’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) says voters cast 3.6 million ballots in Saturday’s parliamentary election and that turnout was 40%. If this is the case, then there can only be about 9 million registered voters. Seems a bit low. How did the IEC get this number? According to the IEC:

…turnout figures are expressed as a percentage of voters who could have voted and did.

In other words, they took a stab at the number of registered voters and subtracted from that their guess of how many lived in areas too insecure to open polling stations.

Sure, why not. Let’s just make up numbers. Here’s what we do know: turnout was 25% less than last year’s presidential election and down close to 50% from the 2005 parliamentary election. These trends are probably a better measure of turnout than the IEC’s made up stuff.