An Italian Senate committee on Wednesday ordered a partial recount of ballots cast in the April general election amid claims that fraud could have been committed.
The cross-party Senate election committee decided unanimously on a recount of all spoiled, blank and contested ballots cast in the April 9-10 election, in which centre-left chief Romano Prodi narrowly defeated former premier Silvio Berlusconi.
The recount will start in seven regions - Lombardy, Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Campania and Sicily - where some 700,000 such ballots were officially tallied.
The committee also ordered a recount of samples of valid ballots in the above regions to ensure that the results correspond to official figures put out by the Interior Ministry.
In the event of "significant differences", a more extensive recount will take place, the committee said.
Committee member Felice Casson, a lawmaker in the governing coalition, said the unanimous vote was "proof of everyone's desire for truth and transparency on this very delicate issue".
The April election was the closest in postwar Italian history, with Prodi winning a majority of two seats in the Senate and 49.8% in the House compared to Berlusconi's 49.73% - a margin of just 25,000 votes out of 38.1 million cast.
Berlusconi afterwards accused the centre left of vote rigging and refused to concede defeat, even when the Supreme Court confirmed Prodi's win having examined disputed ballots.
He then demanded a recount.
Berlusconi said on Wednesday that the Senate committee's decision was "a first positive step, particularly because it was unanimous... We insist that (election night) was a night of fraud and insist on our request for a recount of all the ballots, not just the blank and spoiled ones".
Last month, a docu-film made by two journalists claimed electoral fraud did take place but suggested it was carried out by Berlusconi's Forza Italia party using blank ballot slips.
The substance of the film Uccidete la Democrazia! (Killing Democracy!) was firmly denied by the centre right while its two authors, Enrico Deaglio and Beppe Cremagnani, are now being probed on suspicion of spreading false information.
The two left-wing journalists highlighted an allegedly anomalous drop in the number of blank slips in the last election - 1.1% of the total compared to 4.2% in the previous 2001 election.
They also noted that the percentage of blank slips was the same right across the country, amounting to 1-2% in all 20 regions.
They argued that some geographical variations would be expected but instead, even in the southern region of Campania around Naples where blank slips totalled 8% in 2001, the tally this year was 1.4%.
In a fictional recreation of the vote counting night of April 10, Killing Democracy! suggested software installed in the system for transmitting data to the Interior Ministry's central tallying system had been used to transform blank ballots into Forza Italia votes.
It speculated that the fraud was stopped at the last minute by then interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu, leaving Prodi with a razor-thin advantage over Berlusconi.
The film also focused on the risks deriving from electronic vote counting, which was introduced for the first time in the 2006 election and used in four regions - Lazio, Puglia, Sardinia and Liguria.
Pisanu, who is suing Deaglio and Cremagnani, said that the Senate committee's decision to recount all blank ballots was "opportune" and would "dispel all possible doubts".
Interior Minister Giuliano Amato also praised the committee's decision, saying it was "good and useful".
The 2006 election was certainly the most chaotic and nail-biting in recent history.
After the closing of Italian polling stations on April 10, it took 20 hours for the final result to be announced, despite the use of electronic vote counting which was supposed to speed up the process.
The first exit polls forecast a clear victory for Prodi's coalition in both chambers of parliament but towards evening, it became clear the lead was evaporating.
In the early hours of the day after, it looked as if Prodi would win the House and Berlusconi the Senate - a result which would have left Italy with a hung parliament.
It was only the counting of the postal vote from Italians living abroad that finally and unexpectedly decided the election in Prodi's favour.
But Berlusconi subsequently said voting irregularities had cheated him of victory and demanded a recount of disputed ballots, which he said amounted to more than 43,000 for the House alone and therefore enough to swing the vote his way.
It took the Interior Ministry five days to confirm that the disputed slips were just over 5,000 for the House and Senate combined. The Supreme Court confirmed Prodi's victory on April 19 after checks on the disputed slips.
