Results from five provinces, the first to be posted by the electoral commission, were in line with expectations and did not include Baghdad and other hard-to-predict areas that could prove pivotal for the Shi’ite premier’s bid to remain in power.
They showed Maliki ahead in the largely Shi’ite south, while secularist rival Iraqiya, led by former prime minister Iyad Allawi, was polling well among Iraq’s Sunni minority.
Iraqiya, which has emerged as a major challenger to Maliki, listed a series of alleged violations, saying some of its votes had been removed from boxes, thrown in the garbage and replaced by other ballots.
“Insistence in manipulating these elections forces us to question whether the possibility of fraudulent results would make the final results worthless … We will not stand by with our arms crossed,” an Iraqiya statement said.
Iraqiya said over 250,000 members of Iraq’s military were excluded from voting before election day because their names were not on voter rolls.
The largely Shi’ite Iraqi National Alliance (INA), which includes many former political partners of Maliki, issued a statement expressing “worry about signs of premeditated intentions to alter the results.” It called for greater transparency from IHEC in calculating and posting results.
A clear victory by any of the blocs is unlikely and negotiations to form a coalition government could take months, leaving the possibility of a dangerous political vacuum as US troops prepare to leave Iraq by the end of next year.
Results are anxiously awaited by foreign oil companies making plans to invest billions of dollars and vault Iraq into the top echelon of global producers, and by Washington.
But results from across Iraq’s 18 provinces were again delayed, four days after the parliamentary election Iraqis hope will bring stable government and help end years of sectarian conflict.
Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) said it will release remaining early results as they become available. Final results may take weeks.
“We are continuing with this procedure … until we’re finished,” said Faraj al-Haidari, Iraq’s top electoral official.
With about 30 percent of votes counted in Najaf and Babil, Shi’ite provinces south of Baghdad, Maliki’s State of Law bloc was ahead with about 124,700 votes, followed by 103,600 for the INA.
The Iraqiya list got almost 41,000 votes there. The picture was reversed in Diyala and Salahuddin, where Allawi’s list got more than 77,000 votes, compared to about 17,000 for Maliki’s bloc and almost 16,000 for the INA, the early results showed.
In northern Arbil province, seat of the largely autonomous Kurdistan region, early results showed an alliance of two powerful Kurdish parties far ahead of a reformist challenger.
