Iraqi officials said Wednesday they must recount votes from about 300 ballot boxes because of various discrepancies, delaying final results from the landmark national elections. Hundreds - perhaps thousands - of other ballots were declared invalid because of alleged tampering.Officials had promised final results from the elections by Thursday, the end of the Iraqi work week. On Wednesday, however, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said the deadline would not be met because of the recount. ``We don't know when this will finish,'' he said. ``This will lead to a little postponement in announcing the results.''
No partial tallies have been released since Monday in the contests for the 275-member National Assembly, 18 provincial councils and a regional parliament for the Kurdish self-governing region in the north. The most recent figures showed a coalition of Kurdish parties in second place behind a Shiite-dominated ticket endorsed by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The ticket of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, was a distant third.
Allegations of voting irregularities, especially around the tense northern city of Mosul, have complicated the count. Some leading Sunni Arab and Christian politicians alleged that thousands of their supporters were denied the right to vote. Election officials blamed the problems in the Mosul area on security, which prevented fewer than a third of the planned 330 polling centers from opening. Gunmen seized some ballot boxes, officials said.
The commission would not say how many ballots had been declared invalid and whether they had come from the Mosul area, which has a mostly Sunni Arab population. Many Sunnis are believed to have stayed home on election day, either because they feared insurgent reprisals or opposed a ballot as long as U.S. and other foreign troops were on Iraqi soil.
Commission official Adel al-Lami said the ballots in 40 boxes and 250 bags would not be counted because they appeared to have been stuffed inside them or, in some cases, improperly folded. Some of the boxes were not those approved by the commission, and others were improperly sealed, he said.
Before the election, commission officials estimated each box should contain about 500 ballots. It was unclear whether the bags contained roughly the same number of ballots. A total of 90,000 ballot boxes were used in the election.