Thousands of cheering Haitians poured onto the streets to celebrate the election of Rene Preval as the country's new president.

Preval's victory comes after an election hit with protests and allegations of fraud.

Under an agreement between Haiti's interim government and electoral council, Rene Preval was declared winner of the presidential election early Thursday, diverting a potential crisis in one of the world's poorest nations.

Initially, the vote count showed Preval was just short of the 50 per cent majority required to achieve victory, with almost all of the votes counted.

However, about 85,000 blank ballots were cast during the Feb. 7 election.

The interim government and the electoral council worked out an agreement that had some of the blank votes subtracted from the total number of votes counted.

About 2.2 millions ballots were cast in the election, and the blank ballots represented about 4 per cent of the total.

After the blank ballots were removed from the count, votes for Preval added up to 51.15 per cent of the vote, up from 49.76 per cent under the original count.

That gave Preval a slim majority.

He made no public appearances on Thursday, and stayed inside his sister's house even after electoral officials announced his victory.

"We have won. We thank God and the population," Preval told the Haitian Press Agency in his only public statement. "We will now fight for parliament."

The president-elect is seen as a champion of the poor. He was president from 1996 to 2001, and many Haitians remember him as someone who tried to help them.

His closest rival, Leslie Manigat, accused election officials of breaking the rules to give Preval a first-round victory instead of forcing the two into a runoff.

"We are not going to be sore losers but we are human beings," Manigat told The Associated Press. "The right of a second round of elections is inscribed in the election rules."

He wouldn't say if he would register a formal complaint.

However, Michel Brunache, chief of cabinet for interim president Boniface Alexandre, confirmed the election result.

"We acknowledge the final decision of the electoral council and salute the election of Mr. Rene Preval as president of the Republic of Haiti," Prime Minister Gerard Latortue told The Associated Press after the agreement was made.

Election officials came to the agreement at the end of a late night meeting.

"We have reached a solution to the problem," Max Mathurin, president of the Provisional Electoral Council told AP. "We feel a huge satisfaction at having liberated the country from a truly difficult situation."

The difficult situation Mathurin referred to involved nine days of confusion and chaos in the country as voters waited anxiously for the election results.

More than 7,000 UN troops and 1,750 international police are helping maintain order.

For the past several days, thousands of Preval backers have flooded the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince -- burning tires and erecting barricades.

Voters became suspicious when the results were slow in coming, and massive protests against suspected fraud resulted in one death. Most protests were peaceful, however.

Tuesday, images of ballots found in a garbage dump were broadcast around the world by Haitian television. AP reporters later investigated and found thousands of ballots in the dump, some of them marked for Preval.

The ballots weren't supposed to be thrown out, and the UN mission in Haiti released a statement encouraging "Haitian authorities to investigate fully and prosecute anyone found guilty of this apparent grave breach of the electoral process."

Haitian officials said a commission will be formed in the coming days to review voter tally sheets from the election -- the first vote since a bloody uprising ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Also, about 125,000 ballots were declared invalid as the result of irregularities on election day, prompting further suspicion of possible fraud, and questions about the legitimacy of the vote.

New priorities

The new president has made law-and-order an election priority in the poverty-stricken Caribbean nation and says he will clean up the crime-ridden capital of Port-au-Prince.

Haiti has been the scene of widespread gang kidnappings since the former president was ousted two years ago.

Preval has been noncommittal about whether he will allow his one time ally to return to the country, who was once his ally.

Aristide is in exile in South Africa.

Preval has his work cut out for him. The nation faces daunting challenges after years of inbred corruption in government and the public service, widespread unemployment and massive lack of clean water or health care.

The president-elect has tried to lower expectations by saying his government would not be able to immediately fix all of Haiti's problems.

With files from Associated Press