More than a million Afghans on Saturday defied threats and voted to elect the country’s next president, but the number who turned out was much smaller than the number of those who registered.

Based on rough approximations, the overall population in Afghanistan is estimated between 30 to 35 million people, of whom 16 million are eligible to vote. The IEC previously said that the commission had registered over nine million voters, but from current estimates less than two million people voted in the latest elections.

But the low numbers do not invalidate the results, say Afghan legal experts.

“Based on the Constitution of Afghanistan, it will not have any kind of impact on the credibility and legitimacy of the elections,” said legal expert Wahid Farzayee.

“The general rule is that when we vote, we count the majority of the votes,” said legal expert Gul Rahman Qazi.

Independent election observers said that certain factors contributed to the low turnout in the election, including popular skepticism about its legitimacy, shortcomings in the planning and logistics within the Independent Election Commission (IEC), and security threats.

“Technical problems are first, then there is mistrust among the people, and then the security threats: these are among the key factors that refrained the people from coming out in large numbers,” said Yousuf Rashid, head of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA).

“You know that people are skeptical and they say that when someone was elected before, then there is no need for voting,” said Naeem Ayoubzada, head of the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA).

Public reactions:

“Security threats were very high, we voted five years ago despite security threats, but it did not work,” said Sami Sultani, a resident of Kabul.

“We participated but again we saw fraud,” said Hamid, a resident of Kabul