weekend election trickled in Thursday, a prominent opposition group
supported mostly by Sunnis Muslims made fraud allegations that could
taint the legitimacy of the outcome.
The partial tally from five of
and Babil, while the secular Iraqiya bloc led by former Prime Minister
main Kurdish alliance was winning comfortably in the Kurdish province
of
But with only between 17 percent and 30 percent of
the votes counted in each of those provinces, the results from Sunday’s
balloting were inconclusive. No party is expected to win an outright
majority, and whichever bloc forms the next government probably will
have to do so in coalition with other parties.
The tight race makes an accurate vote count and distribution of seats in the 325-member legislature important.
Al-Maliki is expected to do well in the nine Shiite
provinces of the south, with Allawi dominating the vote in the four
Sunni provinces of the north and center. The strength of al-Maliki’s
lead in Babil and Najaf suggested his faction may be set to win the
largest number of seats in parliament. However, the vote in mixed
Plans to release preliminary nationwide results were
delayed, election officials said, by a glitch that caused computers
processing the ballots to crash on two or three occasions this week.
Those delays have fed allegations of fraud that could undermine
acceptance of the outcome of the vote, especially among
Senior officials in Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc, comprised
mostly of Sunnis and secularists, told a news conference that the
election had been unfair from the outset because of the banning of
hundreds of candidates, and that “violations” were continuing as the
count proceeded.
The officials alleged that ballot boxes had been
left behind at polling centers in Iraqiya strongholds so that they
wouldn’t be counted, and they showed reporters one of nine ballots
marked for the Iraqiya slate that they said they had been found
discarded in the yard of a school used as a polling center in the
northern city of
They also claimed that three vote counters had been
fired after they were caught altering results being entered into the
computerized tally system, and that a senior official in al-Maliki’s
coalition,
visit Wednesday to the counting center. The officials acknowledged they
did not know how widespread the alleged fraud may be.
“The votes of Iraqiya are being thrown in the trash and we don’t know how much tampering is going on,” said
confirmed that three vote counters had been fired Wednesday, but said
it was because they were found to be too slow. “We didn’t do it because
of fraud,” he said.
Ebadi did visit the election commission
headquarters, but he did not enter the area where votes were being
counted, Haideri said.
An official with the United Nations, which is
advising the election, acknowledged that the delay in releasing
comprehensive results risked drawing allegations of malpractice, but
said no significant fraud had been detected so far.
“There’s a lot of distrust anyway, but we don’t see
anything sinister or fraudulent or conspiratorial. It’s all
explainable, but it has slowed the process down,” said the official,
who was not authorized to discuss the matter and requested anonymity.
National Alliance, which appears to be trailing al-Maliki in the south,
also expressed concerns about the transparency of the vote count, and
visited the election commission headquarters to convey his concerns.
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