A full recount of votes for Baghdad province from Iraq’s parliamentary elections showed no fraud or major irregularities and are unlikely to change the vote’s final results, the country’s Election Commission said on Friday.
The original tally announced after the March 7 polls put secular and Sunni-backed candidate Ayad Allawi two seats ahead of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia coalition. Mr Maliki immediately challenged those results, alleging fraud and issued a flurry of appeals for recounts. Officials only granted him a recount for Baghdad, a key province that is home to nearly a quarter of the population.
There are 68 seats in Baghdad up for grabs in the new 325-seat Parliament, and new vote tallies could easily have erased Mr Allawi’s razor-thin lead, and would likely have enraged Iraq’s once-dominant Sunnis.
“The recounting process and the re-tally process has proven the integrity and honesty of the electoral process,” Qassim al-Aboudi, an official with Iraq’s Election Commission, told a news conference on Friday. —AP