Afghan President Hamid Karzai leads in the race for the presidency, but not by enough to avoid a second round of voting, a U.S. government-funded opinion poll published on Monday said, Reuters reported.
The poll, by a Washington-based firm, Glevum Associates, showed Karzai winning 45 percent of the decided votes in the first round, compared with 25 percent for his nearest challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.
Former planning minister Ramazan Bashardost would win 9 percent and former finance minister Ashraf Ghani 4 percent. The remaining 37 candidates all received less than 2 percent, totalling about 17 percent between them.
"As Karzai is below 50 percent of the vote in this decided voter model, a runoff would occur if these numbers hold on August 20," the pollsters concluded in their report.
A U.S. embassy spokeswoman confirmed that the United States had funded the poll, which was conducted independently.
The poll was carried out from July 8-19, based on face-to-face interviews with 3,556 Afghans from provinces across the country, weighted to adjust for the number of interviews in each province and the rural/urban distribution of the population.
Voters were given copies of actual ballots and asked to select who they would vote for.
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