Tony Eastley: Doubts are being raised about the fairness of the Presidential election in East Timor with claims of vote manipulation and voter intimidation.
The accusations come from five of the eight candidates. The Electoral Commission says it won't investigate though until it receives a formal complaint.
At this stage of counting the Fretilin Party Candidate, Francisco Lu Olo Guterres, is clearly in the lead. From Dili, Anne Barker reports.
Anne Barker: All five candidates from East Timor's minor political parties have written to the National Electoral Commission demanding a recount of the entire vote otherwise they say they'll mount a court challenge to the final result.
Candidate: We are not happy with this process and we want the boxes to bring all to Dili and we recount it in, in the Capital.
Anne Barker: They're not the only ones alleging irregularities in the electoral processes.
European Union observers say they too witnessed intimidation at four polling booths and irregular practices during the count. One Australian observer says he's alarmed that close to a quarter of all votes have been declared invalid.
Damien Kingsbury from Deakin University says there must be a recount.
Damien Kingsbury: The problem's not with the vote, the problem appears to be with the counting process.
Last night we had observers count, watching the count, and the number of invalid votes appeared to be very small, in order of a couple of per cent at most and today we see it's jumped to what looks like about a quarter and that simply can't be explained.
It's also worth noting that on a 70 per cent count of the vote, provisionally, Lu Olo, the Fertilin candidate had about 23 per cent of the vote at the end of the day, when the last 30 per cent was counted, he jumped to 29 per cent and that would seem to be statistically highly unusual, highly irregular.
Anne Barker: But doesn't that, isn't that because the votes that have come in today have included those towns where Fretilin has its strongest voter base in Vlatal (phonetic) and Vlatem (phonetic).
Damien Kingsbury: Well they would come in from the more remote polling stations for sure, but that goes equally across the country where Lu Olo is both popular and unpopular, you don't usually expect to see such a significant shift in voter intentions, once 70 per cent of the vote has been counted.
Anne Barker: So do you believe there's been some sort of manipulation of the vote in those two towns?
Damien Kingsbury: I don't know if it's in those two towns as such, I think that what we need to do is to have a recount in Dili, with independent scrutineers not party scrutineers but independent scrutineers, participating and perhaps not allowing the Electoral Commission to participate because there has been concerns that a number of Electoral Commission members are in fact Fretilin Party appointees.
Anne Barker: Are you saying then that the count hasn't been properly supervised or that some of the counters then are corrupt?
Damien Kingsbury: It looks like some of the counters have been influenced by their, their own political affiliations.
Anne Barker: So do you believe if, if Lu Olo becomes the President of East Timor, that he may have got there illegally?
Damien Kingsbury: Well, on the basis of the current numbers he still only has 29 per cent of the vote so he has to go to a second round.
That means that 71 per cent of the vote is non-Fretilin so his chances of being successful of becoming President are still pretty slim, but having said that, I think that candidates like Fernando Lasama de Araujo would have real concerns about this because at 70 per cent of the count, he was within a hairbreadth of overtaking Jose Ramos Horta, now he's well behind, and I think he would have real grounds for being concerned.
Tony Eastley: Damian Kingsbury from Deakin University. That report from Anne Barker in Dili.