Iraqi authorities tallied millions of ballots Friday and received some complaints about the conduct of the parliamentary election, including allegations of "violent interference" with voters. The election commission said none of the complaints involved fraud. Officials said it could take at least two weeks until final results are announced for the new, four-year parliament because all the complaints have to be investigated. Preliminary results might be available in less than a week, they said.The election commission did not provide any figures on how many of Iraq's 15 million voters cast ballots Thursday, but officials estimated turnout could have been as high as 70 percent. Another 320,000 Iraqi expatriates voted abroad, a top Iraqi election official said Friday. The overseas polls were praised by monitors despite several violations being reported.
Hamida al-Hussaini, head of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, told reporters in Amman, Jordan, that the highest polling was in Iran, where 59,000 people voted from Tuesday through Thursday. Jordanian authorities arrested 34 Iraqis for trying to vote twice.
The commission said it had received 178 election complaints so far, and spokesman Ezzeddin al-Mohamady said 35 of them charged "violent interference" from the police, army or election workers. He said most of the rest, 101, were related to campaigning violations such as using religious symbols in campaign ads. Western officials in Baghdad said they had heard reports of numerous voting irregularities in the north and south, most of them dealing with intimidation of voters.
In Mosul, capital of the predominantly Sunni Arab province of Nineveh, an official with the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party charged that Kurdish soldiers voted twice in at least one location. Honayn al-Qado also said there were many names missing from voters rolls. A Mosul official with President Jalal Talabani's Kurdish Democratic Party claimed Sunni Arabs tried to pressure people to vote for their alliance. Abdel Ghani Botani also alleged that thousands of Kurds were missing from voters rolls.
The head of Iraq's largest Sunni Arab slate, the Iraqi Accordance Front, predicted the governing Shiite United Iraqi Alliance would not retain its slim parliamentary majority. Adnan al-Dulaimi said his group, the Kurdish Alliance and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's secular ticket would gain strength and might be able to form a governing coalition. But with Shiite Arabs making up 60 percent of Iraq's 27 million people, the Shiite alliance is expected to win the largest bloc in the 275-member parliament and have the first crack at trying to form a government.
A prominent militant group said Friday the reason it did not attack polling stations was to avoid harming Sunni Arab voters. The strong participation by Sunnis bolstered U.S. hopes that the latest election will produce a broad-based government capable of ending the daily violence that has ravaged the country since Saddam's ouster. Al-Dulaimi said Sunni Arab participation in the election could have been even higher if there were more polling centers in key Sunni areas. An election commission spokesman, Farid Ayar, said officials opened only 167 of the planned 207 voting stations in Anbar province because of security concerns. Anbar includes Ramadi and Fallujah.
Many groups were releasing what they described as preliminary results, none of which could be independently confirmed. They released similar figures after the Jan. 30 election, many of which later were proven inaccurate.