KABUL, Afghanistan -- Presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah demanded Wednesday that Afghan electoral authorities stop counting ballots from a weekend runoff vote, citing new allegations of widespread fraud. The election commission refused and appealed to all sides to await final results.

Abdullah, a one-time aide to a famed warlord during the Afghan anti-Soviet guerrilla campaign, said monitors deployed by his campaign to the polls had recorded ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities. He also announced his team was suspending relations with the Independent Election Commission, accusing it of interfering in the vote and inflating turnout figures.

The finger-pointing in the Saturday election pitting Abdullah against Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai mars what Western officials had hoped would be a peaceful transfer of authority as the U.S. and its allies wind down their 13-year combat mission. Both candidates have promised to sign a security pact with the United States that would allow nearly 10,000 American troops to stay in the country beyond the end of this year to train Afghan security forces and conduct counterterrorism operations.

President Hamid Karzai, the only leader the country has known since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the Taliban, was constitutionally barred from seeking a third term.

Abdullah's team has said its exit polling shows Ahmadzai with a 1 million-vote lead in the current round and claimed election workers and government officials had engineered fraud to help him.

"We announce that we have no confidence or trust in the election bodies," Abdullah said at a news conference. "The counting process should stop immediately, and if that continues, it will have no legitimacy."

He proposed that the two candidates form a joint committee under United Nations supervision to resolve the issue.

A spokesman for the electoral commission, Noor Mohammad Noor, said the vote count was continuing with national and international observers monitoring the process. Preliminary results are not due until July 2, followed by final results July 22, according to the official timetable. Electoral officials have said they would release partial results before that.

"The process will not be stopped. This is Independent Election Commission's decision," Noor said. "We have a code of conduct for both candidates. We hope they both will obey that code."

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan called for respect of the country's laws and electoral institutions, saying Abdullah's announcement had caught it by surprise.

"Regrettable as this step may be, we will continue to engage closely with both campaigns and the electoral commissions, consulting with them on a way forward," the U.N.'s special representative in Afghanistan, Jan Kubish, said in a statement. "For their part, the electoral bodies have to demonstrate the highest levels of transparency and integrity and continue to proactively respond to valid candidate concerns."

A spokesman for Ahmadzai's campaign accused Abdullah of reneging on the code of conduct they both had signed.

"Abdullah's reasons for wanting the counting process suspended are not sufficient," spokesman Faizullah Zaki said. "We strongly reject all accusations of fraud being engineered, and we see that as disrespecting all those citizens who accepted many problems twice and participated in the election."

A spokesman for Karzai's office, Adela Raz, said the outgoing president has respect for both candidates and hopes the problem can be resolved.

Elsewhere Wednesday, residents began to flee a Taliban-infested region across the border in northwest Pakistan where the military began a major offensive, officials said.

The Pakistani military said the long-awaited offensive will target local and foreign militants who use the North Waziristan region as a base to attack Pakistan. The U.S. has pushed Pakistan repeatedly to take action against militant groups in the region that target Afghan and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

So far the offensive has largely relied on airstrikes, but the easing of a curfew to allow residents to leave could indicate a more intense ground offensive is in the making.

A disaster-management authority official, Dil Nawaz Khan, said the agency did not have an exact count of how many people left after the curfew was eased but estimated it was hundreds of families.

Roughly 63,000 people left the North Waziristan tribal region in the weeks before the offensive began Sunday, fleeing previous airstrikes and because of fears of a larger offensive. Authorities expect another 130,000 people to be displaced in the coming days, said Arshad Khan, the head of the disaster management authority.

Information for this article was contributed by Mirwais Khan, Deb Riechmann, Kim Gamel, Ijaz Muhammed, Riaz Khan and Asif Shahzad of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/19/2014