Baghdad, Iraq ? Iraqi officials said Wednesday they must recount votes from about 300 ballot boxes because of various discrepancies, delaying final results from the landmark national elections. Hundreds — perhaps thousands — of other ballots were declared invalid because of alleged tampering.

Post-election violence mounted, raising fears that the Jan. 30 balloting had done little to ease the country’s grave security crisis.

An American soldier was killed Wednesday, and another was wounded in an ambush north of the capital, the U.S. military said. Two other American soldiers died earlier in the week, the command said Wednesday.

Gunmen ambushed a convoy of Kurdish party officials in Baghdad, killing one and wounding four. And in the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist working for a U.S.-funded TV station and his 3-year-old son as they left their home.

Officials had promised final results from the elections by today, the end of the Iraqi work week. On Wednesday, however, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said the deadline would not be met because of the recount.

“We don’t know when this will finish,” he said. “This will lead to a little postponement in announcing the results.”

No partial tallies have been released since Monday in the contests for the 275-member National Assembly, 18 provincial councils and a regional parliament for the Kurdish self-governing region in the north.

The most recent figures showed a coalition of Kurdish parties in second place behind a Shiite-dominated ticket endorsed by Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The ticket of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, was a distant third.