Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s electoral commission said Monday that it threw out less than 1 percent of the ballots in last month’s election because of voting irregularities, an amount not expected to significantly change the outcome.

The announcement moves Iraq a step closer to announcing the final results of the Dec. 15 parliamentary vote, an event expected to trigger intense negotiations among the election’s big winners to form a governing coalition for the next four years.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq received almost 2,000 complaints of fraud or other forms of misconduct in the election. Yet only 58 of those complaints had the potential to change the election’s outcome, according to the commission.

After examining those 58, the commission decided to annul 227 ballot boxes out of the nationwide total of 31,500, said Hussein Hendawi of the commission. The commission found various irregularities, including fake ballots and more ballots than registered voters.

Compared with Iraq’s first parliamentary election a year ago, the degree of fraud was “very, very small,” Hendawi said. Although he wouldn’t specify how the commission’s action would affect the election result, the percentage of annulled boxes is too small to significantly alter the outcome.

Preliminary results show that Iraq’s main Shiite political group, which allied with a Kurdish group to form the current government, again won the largest share of the vote. Sunni groups, which participated in Iraq’s fledgling electoral process for the first time, and secular Shiite groups lodged most of the complaints in the latest election.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of one such Sunni group, said he was dissatisfied with the commission’s action. It was unfair to throw out all the ballots in suspect boxes instead of just the bad ballots, he said, because it penalizes voters and candidates who played by the rules.

“There will be a lot of good votes canceled,” al-Mutlaq said. “The damage they are going to cause this way is worse than correcting it.”

At this point, however, momentum appears to be moving against those disputing the election.

An international group of experts examining Iraq’s electoral process is scheduled to announce its findings Thursday and has given no sign that it has found problems substantially discrediting the election. After that announcement, Iraq’s electoral commission is expected to release final election results, perhaps as soon as Saturday, Hendawi said.

Also Monday:

-The U.S. military said an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter crashed at about 8:20 a.m. north of Baghdad, killing two soldiers. It’s the third helicopter lost in eight days. No information was immediately available on the cause.

In Internet statements, two separate militant Islamist groups claimed Monday that they had shot down a U.S. helicopter. One included a video of a missile hitting a helicopter. Neither statement could be verified.

-The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad reported that an American citizen was killed about 9 a.m. Monday in Baghdad by a roadside bomb targeting a convoy carrying U.S. International Police Liaison Officers.

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