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Eighty days after the vote, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission finally sent the results of the March 7 parliamentary election to the Supreme Court for certification.

But the judiciary prepared to approve the tally just yet: In a statement today, the court said "there are some legal issues that need clarification from IHEC." At least one of those issues involves a candidate for the Iraqi National Alliance, whose ability to run for office was challenged by Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law bloc.

I had to laugh this morning when I read Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal's criticism of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"Adding to the brutal mayhem taking place there, we are watching a deliberate effort on the part of the incumbent prime minister, Mr al Maliki, to hijack the results of the election and deny the Iraqi people their legitimately elected government," he said.

The substance of his criticism is actually fair: Maliki and his allies spent weeks complaining about fraud and questioning the validity of the election, but the recently-concluded Baghdad recount found virtually zero evidence of tampering.

But... a member of the Saudi royal family criticizing anyone for being insufficiently democratic? Seriously?

Interesting report in Al-Rafidayn this morning, which speculates that Moqtada al-Sadr is dropping his opposition (عربي) to Nouri al-Maliki's reappointment as prime minister. (Well, sort of.)

Amir al-Kanani, a senior member of the Sadrist movement, told the newspaper that the Sadrists have no "red lines" on the next prime minister. He said the main concern is that State of Law and the Iraqi National Alliance both adhere to the agreed-upon mechanism for appointing the next PM.

I'll be skeptical of this until the new government is actually seated, but the State of Law alliance announced today that it has agreed to form a coalition (عربي) with the Iraqi National Alliance, the Shi'ite bloc led by the Sadrist movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

52 parliamentary candidates in Iraq, including two who won seats in last month's election, have been retroactively disqualified from the ballot by the judicial panel reviewing de-Ba'athification decisions.

Both of the winning candidates came from the Iraqiyya bloc, which holds a two-seat lead over prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition. The BBC reports that Iraqiyya will replace the disqualified candidates with other people, preserving the balance of power in parliament (though not the will of the voters who elected those candidates).

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and Al-Rafidayn (عربي) both report today that the Iraqi National Alliance and the State of Law coalition are close to a merger. That would put the combined bloc within two seats of the 163-seat majority needed to form a government.

Ali al-Adeeb, a senior member of Maliki's Dawa party, said both sides are "putting the finishing touches" on a merger, and promised an official announcement within the next few weeks.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari won the Sadrist movement's referendum (عربي) on the next prime minister, with 24 percent of the roughly 1.5 million ballots cast.

Jaafar al-Sadr, the son of Dawa party founder Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, placed second with 23 percent of the vote; Qusay as-Suhail, a Sadrist MP (and rumored candidate for the PM job), placed third with 17 percent.

Still far too early to say what will happen with the next Iraqi government; everyone is meeting with everyone else, and nobody wants to tip their hand yet (this Marc Lynch tweet sums it up well). But here's your latest roundup of election news, which includes meetings in Riyadh and possibly Tehran and some speculation about the future of State of Law.

It's the weekend in Iraq, so we'll hear less about post-election political maneuvering for a couple of days -- but two stories worth mentioning this morning. First, Moqtada al-Sadr's supporters have started their referendum to choose the next prime minister.

The horse-trading continues in Iraq: Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is trying to cement a possible merger with the Iraqi National Alliance, but the Sadrist movement seems reluctant; and Iyad Allawi is trying to attract Kurdish support, but the Kurds seem reluctant.

There's a lot to keep track of, so we've rounded up a bullet-point list of the latest political maneuverings after the jump. We'll do similar lists in the coming days as they're needed.

Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition may have won the most seats in this month's Iraqi election -- but increasingly it looks like prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition will form the next government, even if Maliki himself loses his job.

Iraq's political parties spent the weekend in feverish negotiations, which seem to be running along two separate tracks. The first is being conducted in Tehran and Najaf, where Maliki's bloc is meeting with the Iraqi National Alliance; a merger between those two would put Maliki within six seats of holding a majority in parliament.

Senior members of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition are warning of widespread Shi'ite anger -- and even hinting at outright violence -- unless election officials agree to a recount.

Sami Askari, a senior adviser to Maliki, called the Independent High Electoral Commission a "U.N. puppet," and accused the CIA of orchestrating Iraqiyya's apparent narrow victory over State of Law. He warned that Shi'ite southern Iraq might stop sending oil to Baghdad, and made a veiled threat about sectarian violence:

IHEC hasn't released any new results (عربي) today, so the latest official data is still the preliminary results from six provinces reported yesterday.

But the commission did release a statement that generally characterizes the vote in four southern provinces. We already knew prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition did well in Babil and Najaf provinces. The commission says State of Law is also leading in Dhi Qar, Wassit, Qadisiyah and Muthanna provinces. All four are majority-Shi'ite. None are particularly large; Dhi Qar is probably the only one with a population larger than one million.

Iraq's Supreme Court has reportedly reissued a six-year-old warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr's arrest.

This story isn't getting much attention in the English-language media -- everyone's focused on the Diyala bombings (more on those soon) -- but it has the potential to be quite significant.

The warrant is for the 2003 murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a pro-American Shi'ite cleric who was hacked to death by a mob in Najaf. The Coalition Provisional Authority issued a warrant for Sadr's arrest in 2004, but he was never arrested, and the warrant was eventually buried as part of a reconciliation deal with his Mahdi Army.

The Iraqi prime minister is getting hammered from all sides this morning. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and head of the Iraqiyya coalition, accuses Maliki of staging a coup (عربي) against a "peaceful transfer of power" in Iraq.

"The government has made a decision, in collusion with suspicious forces inside and outside Iraq, to exclude important politicians from participating in the political process. The Iraqi people know this is a conspiracy to ignore the will of voters and to exclude opponents of the parties in power... it is a preemptive coup."

Then we have Motqada al-Sadr, who condemns the Maliki government (عربي) for failing to protect the Iraqi people from ongoing violence. "Shame, all shame" on Maliki, Sadr says, "and the blood of the people is on... this government."

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani has ordered a high-level commission to investigate the Justice and Accountability Commission's decision to ban 511 candidates from the March election.

"I myself am not satisfied with the banning decision," said Talabani, a Kurd who heads the three-member presidential council. "We have sent a letter to the Supreme Appeal Court asking whether this committee that issued the decision is legitimate or not."

Talabani's announcement comes 24 hours after Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi declared the ban illegal. The two men met yesterday at Talabani's home to discuss the decision; neither has released details of the meeting, but it's clear they decided to fight the ban.

Reidar Visser makes an important discovery: Ali Faysal al-Lami, the head of Iraq's Justice and Accountability Commission -- which last week banned nearly 500 candidates from Iraq's March parliamentary election -- is himself a candidate in that election.

Lami is running as part of the Iraqi National Alliance, the coalition led by Iraq's two largest Shi'ite parties: the Sadrist movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

In other words: The man who controls the "vetting process for the entire election," as Visser puts it, is himself running for office. Not really a shining moment for Iraq's young democracy.

For those of you who are really, really interested in this subject, Al-Jazeera English's Inside Iraq program did a half-hour show this weekend on the constitutional crisis. It features three Iraqi MPs: Mustafa al-Hiti, Adnan Pachachi, and Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani. Video's after the jump.

Iraq's high electoral commission (IHEC) still hasn't decided whether to approve the de-Baathification commission's request to ban Salah al-Mutlak, and hundreds of other Iraqi politicians, from parliamentary elections in March.

Hamidiyya Husseini, a member of the IHEC, said today that the board has received a formal request (عربي) to exclude Mutlak and the other candidates. The commission said it will decide "within days" whether to approve the request.

Okay, as promised, some more detail on this afternoon's "Iraq in 2020" panel at the Middle East Institute conference. The whole concept was something of a conceit -- as a reader pointed out, there's a lot of uncertainty about Iraq in 2010 -- so most of the panel focused on shorter-term concerns.

I complained earlier about the lack of focus on economics. The panel mostly focused on politics and diplomacy -- how Iraqis will reconcile internally, and how they'll relate to their neighbors (and the U.S.) externally. What really struck me was the divergence between the American panelists, who tended to be more optimistic about the future, and the Iraqi panelists, who seemed pessimistic about intractable problems of Iraqi governance.

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but Nouri al-Maliki formally unveiled his new State of Law political coalition. It contains 40 different parties -- not just Shi'ites, but also Sunni and Kurdish groups.

Maliki decided to form the coalition after refusing to join the new ISCI-Sadr alliance, which refused to promise him another term as prime minister.