Sunni Arab politicians in the ethnically unstablenorthern Iraqi province of Kirkuk claim that their constituents were shortchanged during Sunday's elections by a scarcity of ballots in their districts.
The complaints indicate that local elections, which were held simultaneously with the parliamentary vote, are proving divisive in ethnically and religiously diverse provinces such as Kirkuk, where Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans are all competing for political advantage.
At stake is Kirkuk's possible absorption into the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which already controls three largely Kurdish provinces covering what used to be the US-imposed "No Fly Zone" after the 1991 war against Iraq.
In spite of a national strategy by prominent Sunni organisations to boycott the elections, Sunni Arab voters in Kirkuk were given special dispensation to take part in provincial voting, specifically to thwart Kurdish candidates from dominating the poll.
Rakan Said Ali, a member of the coalition-appointed Kirkuk provincial council, asserts that polling centres in his hometown of Hawija ran out of ballots early in the day, leaving Sunni Arabs, many of whom had trekked in from the surrounding countryside to vote, out of luck.
According to Mr Ali, the bulk of some 95,000 Sunni Arabs registered as voters in the Hawija area tried to vote but almost all of them found that they had missed their chance.
Of 38 designated polling centres in the Hawija district, only 19 actually opened, he said. But more problematically, the electoral commission had only sent 50,000 ballots to the district, even though more than 100,000 voters were on the rolls.
The district's Kurdish minority was able to reach the centres first, he added.
The provincial complaints arose as the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group that had called for an election boycott but made an exception for Kirkuk, issued a statement calling the January 30 elections illegal because they were conducted under foreign occupation.
Electoral officials acknowledge that polling centres in mostly Kurdish and Assyrian parts of Ninevah province, around Mosul, ran out of ballots on January 30.
In north-east Ninevah, where several thousand Assyrian Christians were left ballotless, some stations reportedly reopened briefly the next morning after being restocked with unused ballots from other districts.
Election officials said on Tuesday that they were considering ways to address electoral grievances and deal with some acknowledged irregularities, without giving details. They said they would consult with the United Nations to be sure that any action taken was not illegal.
Western officials concurred with commissioners that, even given the glitches that happened, the election was legitimate. "There was no discrimination, as far as I am aware, against Sunni Arabs in northern Iraq," said Noel Guckian, British consul general for northern Iraq. Insurgent activity was behind some of the disruptions in Ninevah, including the loss of registration lists in the bombing of a warehouse late last year that may have wiped as many as 200,000 mostly Kurdish voters in four districts off the voter roll.
Attacks on election day, meanwhile, kept several Ninevah polling centres from opening. According to Mr Ali's campaign staff, most of the election monitors in Kirkuk province were Kurds, and the commission made no effort to recruit Arab monitors. Additional reporting by Awadh al-Taee
