Reporting from Baghdad — As the first, incomplete results from Iraq's weekend elections trickled in Thursday, a prominent opposition group supported mostly by Sunni Arabs made fraud allegations that could taint the legitimacy of the outcome.
The partial tally from five of Iraq's 18 provinces showed the coalition headed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki taking the lead in two mostly Shiite Muslim southern provinces, Najaf and Babil, while the secular Iraqiya bloc led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was ahead in two mostly Sunni provinces, Diyala and Salahuddin. The Kurdish Alliance was winning comfortably in the Kurdish province of Irbil.
But with only 17% to 30% of the votes counted in each of those provinces, the results are inconclusive. No party is expected to win an outright majority nationally, and the bloc that forms the next government probably will have to do so in coalition with other parties.
The tight race increases the importance of an accurate vote count and distribution of seats in the 325-member legislature.
Maliki is expected to do well in the nine majority Shiite provinces of the south, with Allawi dominating the vote in the four mainly Sunni provinces of the north and center. The strength of Maliki's lead in Babil and Najaf suggested that his faction may be set to win the most seats in parliament. However, the vote in mixed Baghdad, which elects 68 lawmakers, will be crucial in determining the eventual winner.
The planned release of preliminary nationwide results was delayed, election officials said, by a glitch that caused computers processing the ballots to crash two or three times this week. The delays have fed allegations of fraud that could undermine acceptance of the outcome of the vote, especially among Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.
Senior officials in Allawi's Iraqiya bloc, comprising mostly Sunnis and secularists, said at a news conference that the elections had been unfair from the outset because of the banning of hundreds of candidates, and that "violations" were continuing as the count proceeded.
The officials alleged that ballot boxes had been left behind at polling centers in Iraqiya strongholds so that they wouldn't be counted, and they showed reporters one of nine ballotsmarked for the Iraqiya slate that they said had been found discarded in the yard of a school used as a polling center in the northern city of Kirkuk.
