The Incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai is moving closer to winning re-election as election authority said Tuesday he has received 54.1 percent of the votes with results from 91.6 percent polling stations.

Karzai has significantly widened its lead against his major rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who has 28.3 percent, according the partial results released by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Tuesday.

Karzai needs to receive over 50 percent to avoid a second-round run-off.

The vote count progressed very slowly as IEC only released a small part of the results every two or three days. The official final result is expected on Sept. 17.

The U.N.-backed Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) on Tuesday ordered recount in polling stations where fraud was suspected in the Aug. 20 presidential election, but IEC denied receiving such order.

The ECC said, the ballots in polling stations where any candidate won over 95 percent, should be recounted. But it did not say how many polling stations were involved.

The commission members include two Afghans and three foreigners, which was appointed by the U.N..

(Xinhua News Agency September 9, 2009)