"There has been clear and flagrant fraud," said Intisar Allawi, a senior candidate from former premier Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya alliance, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
"There were persons who manipulated or changed the figures to increase the vote in favour of the State of Law Alliance," she said, referring to Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s bloc.
Listing a series of violations, the cross-sectarian alliance said some of its votes had been removed from boxes, thrown in the garbage and replaced by other ballots.
It said over 250,000 members of Iraq's military were excluded from voting before election day because their names were not on voter rolls.
"Insistence in manipulating these elections forces us to question whether the possibility of fraudulent results would make the final results worthless,” it said in a statement cited by Reuters.
“We will not stand by with our arms crossed."
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The largely Shiite Iraqi National Alliance (INA), also expressed "worry about signs of premeditated intentions to alter the results."
It called for greater transparency from the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) in calculating and posting results.
But Maliki’s bloc denied the fraud claims as “exaggerated”.
"This is propaganda from certain lists,” said senior candidate Hassan Sinaid.
“The elections took place in a good atmosphere and the results reflect the views of the Iraqi people."
The national election commission also said the fraud claims were either politically motivated or fuelled by a misunderstanding of the counting procedures.
"We are used to receiving these accusations from political blocs because either they do not know our procedures or they have not had good results in the election," said IHEC official Iyad al-Kinaani.
"That is why they are talking about fraud."
Tight Race
The fraud accusations come as the Iraqi rivals were locked in a tight race to win the prime minister post.
"Allawi is in the lead in Diyala and Salaheddin," Kinaani said, referring to the two Sunni provinces north of Baghdad.
"In Diyala, he is followed by the INA and al-Maliki. In Salaheddin, Allawi is followed by (Interior Minister Jawad) Bolani and then al-Maliki."
Preliminary results also showed that Maliki’s bloc came first in the southern provinces of Najaf and Babil, followed by the INA. Allawi's Iraqiya alliance was in third place.
Maliki’s bloc held a lead of around 7,000 votes in Najaf and of 14,000 in Babil, the figures showed.
In the autonomous region of Kurdistan, the Kurdistania alliance, made up of the region's two long-dominant parties, was in the lead in Arbil province with 27 percent of votes counted.
Kurdistania is made up of regional president Massud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
In second place was the opposition Goran bloc ("Change" in Kurdish), which surprised observers by snaring nearly a quarter of the vote in Kurdish regional elections last year.
Complete results are expected to be announced on March 18 and the final ones, after any appeals are dealt with, will come at the end of the month.
The parliamentary elections, the second since the 2003 US invasion, are seen as a test for reconciliation in the war-torn country.
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