The largest Sunni Arab party in Iraq has said results of the Baghdad vote in last week's national election were fraudulent

reports Al Jazeera

Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the Iraqi Islamic party , called on Tuesday for an immediate revision of the figures.
[snip]
"They should ... immediately revise the figures. The ball is now in the court of the IECI," He said

Uh oh. I think that the formation of a broad coalition including at least some Sunni party is very important for Iraq. After the vote and before the counting there were some promising signs from both Shi'ites and Sunnis. This sounds very bad. For all I know accusations of fraud are just part of the bargaining process, but it is hard for me to imagine people accusing each other of fraud and forming a coalition at the same time.

update: Washingtonpost.com has caught up with al Jazeera on this story. Things do not look good at all.

Saleh Mutlak, ... said: ...

"This election is completely false. It insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on fraud, cheating, frightening people and using religion to frighten the people," he said. "It is terrorism more than democracy."

Mutlak IIRC is a secular Sunni and the most prominent politician in Iraq who refrains from criticizing the Ba'ath. He seems to be claiming that the islamist Sunnis hammered him partly because of fraud in spite of the fact that they were in far oposition before the election. He is unimportant politically and clearly considers a poor result for his party ipso facto fraud. I won't claim that he is used to having his party win 99.9999 % of the vote, because that would be to tar him with the B word. Still I wish I said what he said except for the unsupported claims of fraud as in "This election ... insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on ... frightening people and using religion to frighten the people."

Needless to say, I am not thinking of the Iraqi election.