Afghanistan bans 6,000 election workers

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan's election commission has banned 6,000 of the 165,000 workers who took part in last year's presidential election from working on this year's parliamentary vote, a spokesman said on Thursday.

Western countries and Afghan opposition groups want to see wholesale changes in the election commission after a U.N.-backed watchdog found massive fraud in last year's presidential vote.

Last month, election authorities announced the postponement of the parliamentary poll to September 18 from May 22, easing a source of friction between President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers who wanted time for electoral reforms.

The 6,000 banned staff will be prohibited from working on any future elections for failing to abide by the body's "mechanisms and procedures," said commission spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor.

"After the presidential election, for the improvement of the polling process, we have started a series of measures and one step was this one. We are trying to take more measures in this regard," he said.

The commission will report for prosecution any of the banned staff proved to have been involved in fraud, Noor said.

Opponents blame the Karzai-appointed commission for failing to halt last year's fraud, when the U.N.-backed watchdog threw out nearly a third of Karzai's votes, lowering his total below the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off.

Karzai was declared the winner anyway when his main challenger pulled out of a planned second round.

Donor nations provided security and more than $230 million dollars for the poll last year. The United Nations is holding tens of millions of dollars earmarked for this year's vote, with diplomats saying they will not release the money without reforms.

The presidential poll damaged Karzai's standing among the Western countries with 114,000 troops in Afghanistan, even as U.S. President Barack Obama re-evaluated his strategy and ultimately decided to commit 30,000 more American troops.

Karzai has consistently maintained that the extent of fraud was exaggerated by Western media.

The parliamentary election could prove crucial this year, because the central government needs to demonstrate that its institutions are backed by the public. Parliamentarians, once seen as docile, caused Karzai headaches last month by twice vetoing most of his candidates for cabinet posts.

(Editing by Peter Graff)