**Iraq’s election commission has rejected calls from the president and prime minister for a recount of votes cast in the general election on 7 March.**An election official said a recount of all votes would be impossible and was unnecessary because of checks on fraud.
Earlier, President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri Maliki backed calls for a manual recount of votes.
Partial results indicate a close race between Mr Maliki and former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
But the long delay in announcing the full results has led to growing allegations of fraud.
Change of tone
With just over 90% of the votes counted, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) said on Saturday that Mr Allawi’s Iraqiya political bloc was ahead by nearly 8,000 votes nationwide.
But Mr Maliki’s State of Law alliance was ahead in seven of 12 provinces - meaning he stands to get more representation in a future parliament as seats are allocated based on the outcome in each province.
VOTE COUNT PROCESS
Counting the individual votes was completed not long after the 7 March vote - and was carried out in each province.Since then the election commission has been compiling and cross-checking the tallies from each province, candidate and party at its headquarters in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
This is what has been taking the time. Every piece of data is entered into the computers twice, by different teams working separately, to guard against fraud and errors.
The two sets of results are then re-entered and re-checked by the computers. If they fall outside an acceptable margin of error, they start the process again.
There is then supposed to be an additional manual check on these two sets of results before they are released.
It is now likely to take longer still as officials now say they plan to investigate all complaints before they release complete results.
“As the president of the state, authorised to preserve the constitution and to ensure justice and absolute transparency, I demand the Independent High Electoral Commission recount the ballots manually starting from Sunday, March 21,” Mr Talabani said in a statement.
He did not say which provinces’ votes should be recounted.
Mr Maliki has also backed calls for a manual recount of votes but has not made it clear if the count should be nationwide.
On Wednesday he called for a recount in the Baghdad region.
Mr Maliki’s tone has changed from last weekend, says the BBC’s Andrew North in Baghdad. At that time he appeared to have a firmer lead and said the election process appeared to be going smoothly.
IHEC head Faraj al-Haidari told AFP news agency that all the political parties had been provided with the interim results and that if they thought there were errors they could request recounts at “particular centres”.
International observers have largely approved of the conduct of the election.
But Mr Allawi, who headed the country from 2004 to 2005, said the vote had been “grossly mismanaged” and that full results should have been declared days ago.
Final results - after complaints have been investigated - are due by the end of the month.