Iraqi Election Commission Acknowledges Fraud

[tekisui]

Source: AP

BAGHDAD – Iraqi officials nullified election results in more than 30 polling stations 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 said final results of the Jan. 31 voting would be certified and announced this week.

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.

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.

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, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not supposed to talk about the vote to media, said the most widespread fraud appeared to have been in Diyala province, which has large Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities and an ongoing insurgency.


more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090215/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq