Dili – The confusion surrounding the first round of voting in East Timor's presidential election mounted Saturday when the election commission said a district with 100,000 eligible voters had produced three times as many votes.

Martinho Gusmao, spokesman for the national election commission, could not explain the discrepancy, which emerged amid growing questions about East Timor's first presidential poll since independence in 2002.

"It registered a little more than 100,000 but the result is more than 300,000," he said of Bacau, East Timor's second town. The surplus 200,000 would represent a huge proportion of the total vote – East Timor has just 520,000 eligible voters.

"The commissioners will discuss it together in order to find out how this illogical situation happened in Bacau."

Gusmao refused to say whether the new discovery could invalidate the provisional results, in which Jose Ramos-Horta, East Timor's current prime minister, and Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres, the ruling Fretilin party's candidate, emerged to contest the run-off.

The commission said Friday that serious flaws in the election could force some areas to repeat first-round voting.

Most of the candidates who stood formally demanded a recount, even though international observers said the poll in the former Portuguese colony was generally orderly and peaceful.

The commission rejected their demand on Thursday, saying there was no legal basis on which to grant the request.

A number of the candidates also raised the possibility that voters were intimidated, stoking fears of instability in the troubled state ahead of the second round.