Sunni, Secular Groups Demand New Vote

U.S. officials continued to praise the conduct of the election, and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, a leader of the Shiite ruling coalition, played down the complaints in an appearance on Iraqi television Tuesday night. The election, he said, "should be seen as a victory for all Iraqis, regardless of any doubts or skepticism."

The campaign leading to Thursday's vote was marked by heightened violence, including the assassinations of candidates and election workers and attacks on party offices. But the balloting itself was hailed in diverse quarters as an overall success.

As results emerged this week, however, cries of fraud and ballot-rigging surged.

Mutlak said, for example, that in Shiite-populated southern Iraq, militiamen fired guns in the air to intimidate voters, ballots disappeared under the control of militias and polling places claimed to run out of ballots on election day. Other critics have complained of ghost voters, duplicate voters and people being bused from other districts to vote.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad insisted Tuesday that "overall, from what we know so far, the election went very well."

"It's too soon to speak definitively about the results, but everyone, all the communities, participated," he said. "That was very important. That was a significant step."

Though estimated to account for 20 percent of Iraq's population, Sunni Arabs dominated the government of Saddam Hussein, as well as previous administrations. When Hussein was toppled in 2003 by the U.S.-led invasion, Sunnis largely rejected the new political process that was brokered by American occupation officials and gradually dominated by the country's Shiite majority.

After Sunni Arabs boycotted elections for a transitional parliament in January, the United States worked strenuously behind the scenes to bring them into the political process, arguing that Sunni participation in government might dampen the insurgency.

The Sunni Arab vote in provinces of central Iraq was splintered among Dulaimi's main Sunni coalition, Mutlak's party and, in Salahuddin province, a small party headed by Mishan Jabouri.

In addition to the Sunni slates, secular groups appeared to attract little support, including those of Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, who as an exile had pushed the Bush administration to invade Iraq. There was much speculation that Allawi, a secular Shiite, would capitalize on dissatisfaction with Iraq's current leaders, but his party received only 14 percent of the vote in Baghdad and a lower percentage in other provinces.

"It looks like people preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identity," Khalilzad told reporters. "But for Iraq to succeed, there has to be cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic cooperation. At this point, it seems sectarian and ethnic identity has played a dominant role in the vote."

Even before the voting began, Sunni leaders had said the country's electoral system was stacked against them.

The number of parliamentary seats allocated to each province was based on the number of registered voters rather than population, since no reliable census exists for much of the country. That shortchanged Sunni regions that boycotted the January elections, said B.B. Abdul Qadir, an official with the Iraqi Islamic Party.

According to an analysis that Qadir presented to Iraqi election officials, the four provinces with the largest Sunni populations have eight fewer seats than they should.

A U.S. official in Fallujah, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said there was some validity to the claim but that the total shortfall was probably closer to a few seats.

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.