The fate of 5,324 candidates were sealed in ballot boxes Thursday as Saudi male citizens voted at 748 election centers across the Kingdom to elect regional municipal councils. Around 1.2 million male voters had registered to take part in the elections. The early hours of voting appeared to attract little interest on the first day of the weekend. Just a few voters showed up before midday at a polling station in Al-Olaya neighborhood in central Riyadh. But as the day progressed, more and more voters visited the polling booths. Some 5,324 candidates are competing for 1,056 seats to fill half the seats in the 285 councils. The other half are appointed by the government. Election results will be announced Saturday, Dr. Abdul Aziz Al-Nahari, spokesman of the local committee of municipal elections in Jeddah told Saudi Gazette. “I decided to bring my young daughter along with me,” said Badr Al-Sufyani, one of the early voters at a polling booth in Jeddah. Some ballots were nullified by the Municipal Election Committee at Jeddah's Azizia center because it found dual registrations. “We have discovered that some voters registered their names twice. We immediately canceled their votes,” said Ibrahim Al-Ghamdi, director of the Fourth Election Center in Azizia district. A voter cannot register his name twice, because he can only vote once, Al-Ghamdi said. The voters who already had their names registered in the previous elections did not have to re-register in the voters' list. Some voters complained of not finding the photos of candidates in front of their names on the ballot paper, making it difficult for them to select the candidate of their choice. Thursday's polling comes just four days after King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, granted women the right to vote and run in the next municipal elections, scheduled for 2015. The first municipal elections in the Kingdom were held in 2005, but the government extended the existing council's term for two years. __
