BAGHDAD – Iraqi officials nullified election results in more than 30 polling stations across the country due to fraud in last month's provincial balloting, but the cases were not significant enough to require a new vote in any province, the election chief said Sunday. Faraj al-Haidari of the election commission said final results of the Jan. 31 voting would be certified and announced this week. Voters in 14 of the 18 provinces were choosing members of ruling provincial councils in an election seen as a dress rehearsal for parliamentary voting by the end of the year.
Preliminary official results announced Feb. 5 showed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ticket swept to victory over Shiite religious parties in Baghdad and southern Iraq — a strong endorsement of his crackdown on Shiite extremists.
Al-Haidari said his commission had looked into fraud allegations from across the country and would announce the findings along with the certified results. But he added "we won't cancel" the election in any province. He told The Associated Press that the polling stations where ballots were nullified were scattered in all 14 provinces, but he refused to say where the largest number was found. He did not say how many ballots were affected.
One official said the most widespread fraud appeared to have been in Diyala province, which has large Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities and an ongoing insurgency.
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U.S. officials have been closely watching the Diyala results for signs of friction between Arabs and Kurds, who are the biggest community in the far north of the province. The Kurds were hoping that a strong Kurdish showing in those areas would bolster their case for incorporating parts of the province into the Kurdish self-ruled region.